TD-EVAL: Revisiting Task-Oriented Dialogue Evaluation by Combining Turn-Level Precision with Dialogue-Level Comparisons
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Apr 28, 2025
Abstract
Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems are experiencing a revolution driven by
Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the evaluation methodologies for these
systems remain insufficient for their growing sophistication. While traditional
automatic metrics effectively assessed earlier modular systems, they focus
solely on the dialogue level and cannot detect critical intermediate errors
that can arise during user-agent interactions. In this paper, we introduce
TD-EVAL (Turn and Dialogue-level Evaluation), a two-step evaluation framework
that unifies fine-grained turn-level analysis with holistic dialogue-level
comparisons. At turn level, we evaluate each response along three TOD-specific
dimensions: conversation cohesion, backend knowledge consistency, and policy
compliance. Meanwhile, we design TOD Agent Arena that uses pairwise comparisons
to provide a measure of dialogue-level quality. Through experiments on MultiWOZ
2.4 and {\tau}-Bench, we demonstrate that TD-EVAL effectively identifies the
conversational errors that conventional metrics miss. Furthermore, TD-EVAL
exhibits better alignment with human judgments than traditional and LLM-based
metrics. These findings demonstrate that TD-EVAL introduces a new paradigm for
TOD system evaluation, efficiently assessing both turn and system levels with a
plug-and-play framework for future research.
