IQ-Net: A DNN model for estimating interaction-level dialogue quality with conversational agents

An automated metric to evaluate dialogue quality is critical for continuously optimizing large-scale conversational agent systems such as Alexa. Previous approaches for tackling this problem often rely on a limited set of manually designed and/or heuristic features, which cannot be easily scaled to a large number of domains or scenarios. In this paper, we present Interaction-Quality-Network (IQ-Net), a novel DNN model that allows us to predict interaction-level dialogue quality directly from raw dialogue contents and system metadata without human engineered NLP features. The IQ-Net architecture is compatible with several pre-trained neural network embeddings and architectures such as CNN, Elmo, and BERT. Through an ablation study in Alexa, we demonstrate that several variants of IQ-Net outperform a baseline model with manually engineered features (3.89% improvement in F1 score, 3.15% in accuracy, and 6.1% in precision score), while also reduce the efforts to extend to new domains/use-cases.