GRADE: Automatic Graph-Enhanced Coherence Metric for Evaluating Open-Domain Dialogue Systems

Automatically evaluating dialogue coherence is a challenging but high-demand ability for developing high-quality open-domain dialogue systems. However, current evaluation metrics consider only surface features or utterance-level semantics, without explicitly considering the fine-grained topic transition dynamics of dialogue flows. Here, we first consider that the graph structure constituted with topics in a dialogue can accurately depict the underlying communication logic, which is a more natural way to produce persuasive metrics. Capitalized on the topic-level dialogue graph, we propose a new evaluation metric GRADE, which stands for Graph-enhanced Representations for Automatic Dialogue Evaluation. Specifically, GRADE incorporates both coarse-grained utterance-level contextualized representations and fine-grained topic-level graph representations to evaluate dialogue coherence. The graph representations are obtained by reasoning over topic-level dialogue graphs enhanced with the evidence from a commonsense graph, including k-hop neighboring representations and hop-attention weights. Experimental results show that our GRADE significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art metrics on measuring diverse dialogue models in terms of the Pearson and Spearman correlations with human judgements. Besides, we release a new large-scale human evaluation benchmark to facilitate future research on automatic metrics.