Large Language Models as User-Agents for Evaluating Task-Oriented-Dialogue Systems

Traditionally, offline datasets have been used to evaluate task-oriented dialogue (TOD) models. These datasets lack context awareness, making them suboptimal benchmarks for conversational systems. In contrast, user-agents, which are context-aware, can simulate the variability and unpredictability of human conversations, making them better alternatives as evaluators. Prior research has utilized large language models (LLMs) to develop user-agents. Our work builds upon this by using LLMs to create user-agents for the evaluation of TOD systems. This involves prompting an LLM, using in-context examples as guidance, and tracking the user-goal state. Our evaluation of diversity and task completion metrics for the user-agents shows improved performance with the use of better prompts. Additionally, we propose methodologies for the automatic evaluation of TOD models within this dynamic framework.

Mining Entity Synonyms with Efficient Neural Set Generation

Mining entity synonym sets (i.e., sets of terms referring to the same entity) is an important task for many entity-leveraging applications. Previous work either rank terms based on their similarity to a given query term, or treats the problem as a two-phase task (i.e., detecting synonymy pairs, followed by organizing these pairs into synonym sets). However, these approaches fail to model the holistic semantics of a set and suffer from the error propagation issue. Here we propose a new framework, named SynSetMine, that efficiently generates entity synonym sets from a given vocabulary, using example sets from external knowledge bases as distant supervision. SynSetMine consists of two novel modules: (1) a set-instance classifier that jointly learns how to represent a permutation invariant synonym set and whether to include a new instance (i.e., a term) into the set, and (2) a set generation algorithm that enumerates the vocabulary only once and applies the learned set-instance classifier to detect all entity synonym sets in it. Experiments on three real datasets from different domains demonstrate both effectiveness and efficiency of SynSetMine for mining entity synonym sets.