Evaluating Task-Oriented Dialogue Consistency through Constraint Satisfaction

ACL ARR 2024 April Submission778 Authors

16 Apr 2024 (modified: 23 May 2024)ACL ARR 2024 April SubmissionEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Abstract: Task-oriented dialogues must maintain consistency both within the dialogue itself, ensuring logical coherence across turns, and with the conversational domain, accurately reflecting external knowledge. We propose to conceptualize dialogue consistency as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP), wherein variables represent segments of the dialogue referencing the conversational domain, and constraints among variables reflect dialogue properties, including linguistic, conversational, and domain-based aspects. To demonstrate the feasibility of the approach, we utilize a CSP solver to detect inconsistencies in dialogues re-lexicalized by an LLM. Our findings indicate that: (i) CSP is effective to detect dialogue inconsistencies; and (ii) consistent dialogue re-lexicalization is challenging for state-of-the-art LLMs, achieving only a 0.15 accuracy rate when compared to a CSP solver. Furthermore, through an ablation study, we reveal that constraints derived from domain knowledge pose the greatest difficulty in being respected. We argue that CSP captures core properties of dialogue consistency that have been poorly considered by approaches based on component pipelines.
Paper Type: Long
Research Area: Dialogue and Interactive Systems
Research Area Keywords: automatic creation and evaluation of language resources, evaluation, dialogue, task oriented dialogue
Contribution Types: Data analysis
Languages Studied: English
Submission Number: 778
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