In this paper, we survey the methods and concepts developed for the evaluation of dialogue systems. Evaluation, in and of itself, is a crucial part during the development process. Often, dialogue systems are evaluated by means of human evaluations and questionnaires. However, this tends to be very cost-and time-intensive. Thus, much work has been put into finding methods which allow a reduction in involvement of human labour. In this survey, we present the main concepts and methods. For this, we differentiate between the various classes of dialogue systems (task-oriented, conversational, and question-answering dialogue systems). We cover each class by introducing the main technologies developed for the dialogue systems and then present the evaluation methods regarding that class.

This paper presents a novel approach for multi-lingual sentiment classification in short texts. This is a challenging task as the amount of training data in languages other than English is very limited. Previously proposed multi-lingual approaches typically require to establish a correspondence to English for which powerful classifiers are already available. In contrast, our method does not require such supervision. We leverage large amounts of weaklysupervised data in various languages to train a multi-layer convolutional network and demonstrate the importance of using pretraining of such networks. We thoroughly evaluate our approach on various multi-lingual datasets, including the recent SemEval-2016 sentiment prediction benchmark (Task 4), where we achieved stateof-the-art performance. We also compare the performance of our model trained individually for each language to a variant trained for all languages at once. We show that the latter model reaches slightly worse -but still acceptable -performance when compared to the single language model, while benefiting from better generalization properties across languages.

In this paper, we propose a classifier for predicting message-level sentiments of English micro-blog messages from Twitter. Our method builds upon the convolutional sentence embedding approach proposed by (Severyn and Moschitti, 2015a; Severyn and Moschitti, 2015b). We leverage large amounts of data with distant supervision to train an ensemble of 2-layer convolutional neural networks whose predictions are combined using a random forest classifier. Our approach was evaluated on the datasets of the SemEval-2016 competition (Task 4) outperforming all other approaches for the Message Polarity Classification task.

In this paper we present SB10k, a new corpus for sentiment analysis with approx. 10,000 German tweets. We use this new corpus and two existing corpora to provide state-of-the-art benchmarks for sentiment analysis in German: we implemented a CNN (based on the winning system of SemEval-2016) and a feature-based SVM and compare their performance on all three corpora. For the CNN, we also created German word embeddings trained on 300M tweets. These word embeddings were then optimized for sentiment analysis using distant-supervised learning. The new corpus, the German word embeddings (plain and optimized), and source code to re-run the benchmarks are publicly available.

The lack of time-efficient and reliable evaluation methods hamper the development of conversational dialogue systems (chatbots). Evaluations requiring humans to converse with chatbots are time and cost-intensive, put high cognitive demands on the human judges, and yield low-quality results. In this work, we introduce Spot The Bot, a cost-efficient and robust evaluation framework that replaces human-bot conversations with conversations between bots. Human judges then only annotate for each entity in a conversation whether they think it is human or not (assuming there are humans participants in these conversations). These annotations then allow us to rank chatbots regarding their ability to mimic the conversational behavior of humans. Since we expect that all bots are eventually recognized as such, we incorporate a metric that measures which chatbot can uphold human-like behavior the longest, i.e., Survival Analysis. This metric has the ability to correlate a bot's performance to certain of its characteristics (e.g., fluency or sensibleness), yielding interpretable results. The comparably low cost of our framework allows for frequent evaluations of chatbots during their evaluation cycle. We empirically validate our claims by applying Spot The Bot to three domains, evaluating several stateof-the-art chatbots, and drawing comparisons to related work. The framework is released as a ready-to-use tool.

In this paper we propose a system for reranking answers for a given question. Our method builds on a siamese CNN architecture which is extended by two attention mechanisms. The approach was evaluated on the datasets of the SemEval-2017 competition for Community Question Answering (cQA), where it achieved 7 th place obtaining a MAP score of 86.24 points on the Question-Comment Similarity subtask.

English. In this paper, we propose a classifier for predicting sentiments of Italian Twitter messages. This work builds upon a deep learning approach where we leverage large amounts of weakly labelled data to train a 2-layer convolutional neural network. To train our network we apply a form of multi-task training. Our system participated in the EvalItalia-2016 competition and outperformed all other approaches on the sentiment analysis task.In questo articolo, presentiamo un sistema per la classificazione di soggettività e polarità di tweet in lingua italiana. L'approccio descritto si basa su reti neurali. In particolare, utilizziamo un dataset di 300M di tweet per addestrare una convolutional neural network. Il sistemaè stato addestrato e valutato sui dati forniti dagli organizzatori di Sentipolc, task di sentiment analysis su Twitter organizzato nell'ambito di Evalita 2016..

The goal of this work is to build conversational Question Answering (QA) interfaces for the large body of domain-specific information available in FAQ sites. We present DoQA, a dataset with 2,437 dialogues and 10,917 QA pairs. The dialogues are collected from three Stack Exchange sites using the Wizard of Oz method with crowdsourcing. Compared to previous work, DoQA comprises well-defined information needs, leading to more coherent and natural conversations with less factoid questions and is multi-domain. In addition, we introduce a more realistic information retrieval (IR) scenario where the system needs to find the answer in any of the FAQ documents. The results of an existing, strong, system show that, thanks to transfer learning from a Wikipedia QA dataset and fine tuning on a single FAQ domain, it is possible to build high quality conversational QA systems for FAQs without indomain training data. The good results carry over into the more challenging IR scenario. In both cases, there is still ample room for improvement, as indicated by the higher human upperbound.