Helpfulness and Fairness of Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Task-oriented dialogue systems aim to answer questions from users and provide immediate help. Therefore, how humans perceive their helpfulness is important. However, neither the human-perceived helpfulness of task-oriented dialogue systems nor its fairness implication has been studied yet. In this paper, we define a dialogue response as helpful if it is relevant & coherent, useful, and informative to a query and study computational measurements of helpfulness. Then, we propose utilizing the helpfulness level of different groups to gauge the fairness of a dialogue system. To study this, we collect human annotations for the helpfulness of dialogue responses and build a classifier that can automatically determine the helpfulness of a response. We design experiments under 3 information-seeking scenarios and collect instances for each from Wikipedia. With collected instances, we use carefully-constructed questions to query the state-of-the-art dialogue systems. Through analysis, we find that dialogue systems tend to be more helpful for highly-developed countries than less-developed countries, uncovering a fairness issue underlying these dialogue systems.