arXiv Computation and Language

Evaluating Language Models in Realistic Conversational Contexts

The paper introduces UPHELD, a large benchmark of human-to-human dialogues written by professional script writers, featuring realistic turn densities and over 36,000 per-turn human annotations. It evaluates existing automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-judge methods, finding them unreliable against expert human judgment. Using UPHELD, the authors develop a Mixture-of-Judges framework that improves correlation with human assessments by about 30%.

arXiv AI
Jul 15

Operationalising Multi-Dimensional Evaluation for Conversational Agents: A Scalable, Governed Pipeline with Selective Re-evaluation and Model Benchmarking

arXiv:2607. 12085v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating retail conversational agents requires methods beyond lexical-overlap metrics to assess intent alignment, factuality, helpfulness, clarity, tone, and overall response quality.

By Niranjan Kumar M, Balaji Nagarajan, Karthik Nair, Faysal Satter, Nithin Surendran
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Human or Machine? A Preliminary Turing Test for Speech-to-Speech Interaction

The paper reports the first Turing test for speech‑to‑speech systems, gathering 2,968 human judgments on conversations between nine state‑of‑the‑art S2S systems and 28 humans. None of the evaluated systems passed the test, highlighting a clear gap in human‑likeness. The authors diagnose the failure with an 18‑dimension taxonomy, finding that paralinguistic cues, emotional expressivity, and conversational persona—not semantic understanding—are the main bottlenecks, and they propose an interpretable model for automatic human‑vs‑machine discrimination.

By Xiang Li, Jiabao Gao, Sipei Lin, Xuan Zhou, Chi Zhang, Bo Cheng, Jiale Han, Benyou Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Benchmarking LLM Judges for Voice-Agent Evaluation: Reliability, Calibration, and Human Oversight

The paper evaluates the use of large language models (LLMs) as judges for assessing conversational voice agents, comparing human judgments with GPT‑4.1 and GPT‑5 across telecom and retail interactions. It examines agreement, metric‑level correlations, and consistency across three evaluation configurations (p0, p1, p2) to determine how reliably LLMs can judge conversational quality and safety. The study finds that LLM‑based evaluation can be effective but its reliability varies by metric and configuration, suggesting a hybrid approach where LLMs handle scalable assessment while humans focus on metrics requiring contextual interpretation.

By Anupam Purwar, Shashank Singh, Kritika Srivastava
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

LLJ Cards: Best practices for the Use of LLMs as Judges

arXiv:2609.24516v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a popular alternative for evaluation. Often referred to as LLMs as judges (LLJs), these s...

By Khaoula Chehbouni, Melina Medjdoub, Florian Carichon, Golnoosh Farnadi, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 5

Understanding Clinical Cognitive Dialogues Using Large Language Models

The paper introduces a de‑identified corpus of 33 in‑person cognitive assessment conversations, comprising 8,250 utterances annotated for three speaker roles and 56 dialogue acts. The authors benchmark large language models on fine‑grained dialogue‑act classification and next‑patient‑utterance generation, finding that instruction tuning and reasoning‑aware fine‑tuning improve performance but that models still struggle with closely related dialogue acts. The corpus and benchmark are presented as tools to measure interaction structure in cognitive assessments and to support future research on conversational markers, clinician education, and validated simulated patients.

By Vishalakshi Arumugam, Dan Schumacher, Veronica Rammouz, Erfan Nourbakhsh, Enrique Gonzalez Guerrero, Jeremy Davis, Anthony Rios
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Evaluating Communicative Success in Machine-Translated Conversation

The paper introduces a three‑layer checklist-and-judge framework to evaluate interpreter agents that mediate live conversation across languages. It assesses semantic, pragmatic, and cultural‑social dimensions—naturalness, intent, and social appropriateness—rather than just fidelity, in both single‑turn and multi‑turn settings. Extensive validation shows that conventional MT metrics miss failures in stronger interpreters, and that context, structured instructions, and cultural cues influence communicative success.

By Faiz Ghifari Haznitrama, Alice Oh
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Benchmarking LLM-as-a-Judge for Long-Form Output Evaluation

The paper introduces LongJudgeBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) acting as judges for long-form text generation. It highlights that long-form evaluation requires complex, document-level assessments beyond simple length, such as organization, coverage, depth, consistency, and scenario-specific quality. Experiments show a significant reliability gap among current LLM judges, indicating instability across scenarios and limited effectiveness of rubrics or references.

By Junjie Chen, Yuxi Dong, Haitao Li, Weihang Su, Yujia Zhou, Min Zhang, Yiqun Liu, Qingyao Ai
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

TalkFa: A Unified Benchmark for Farsi Dialogue Generation and Understanding

TalkFa introduces a unified benchmark for Farsi dialogue generation and understanding, comprising three datasets: WIKI‑FADIAL (4.2K Wikipedia‑grounded dialogues), DAILYDIALOG‑FA (6.6K dialogues with dialogue‑act and emotion annotations), and PLAYDIAL‑FA (2.1K theatrical dialogues with sentiment labels). All dialogues are curated through multi‑stage review by native speakers, ensuring high quality. Experiments show that LoRA fine‑tuning improves generation performance with less data, while specific models excel on classification tasks, and human evaluation confirms the benchmark’s reliability.

By Neda Jamshidi, Kamyar Zeinalipour, Fahimeh Akbari, Monica Bianchini, Marco Maggini, Marco Gori
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Evaluating the Evaluator: Summarization Metrics and LLM-Judges beyond English

The paper introduces BASSE, a multilingual meta‑evaluation dataset containing 2,040 human‑rated abstractive summaries produced manually or by five LLMs with four prompts. Annotators scored each summary on coherence, consistency, fluency, relevance, and 5W1H using a 5‑point Likert scale. Benchmarking shows proprietary LLM‑judge models best align with human judgments, followed by criteria‑specific automatic metrics, while open‑source judge LLMs perform poorly.

By Jeremy Barnes, Naiara Perez, Alba Bonet-Jover, Bego\~na Altuna