Ad-hoc Evaluations Along the Lifecycle of Industrial Spoken Dialogue Systems: Heading to Harmonisation?

With a view to rationalise the evaluation process within the Orange Labs spoken dialogue system projects, a field audit has been realised among the various related professionals. The article presents the main conclusions of the study and draws work perspectives to enhance the evaluation process in such a complex organisation. We first present the typical spoken dialogue system project lifecycle and the involved communities of stakeholders. We then sketch a map of indicators used across the teams. It shows that each professional category designs its evaluation metrics according to a case-by-case strategy, each one targeting different goals and methodologies. And last, we identify weaknesses in the evaluation process is handled by the various teams. Among others, we mention: the dependency on the design and exploitation tools that may not be suitable for an adequate collection of relevant indicators, the need to refine some indicators’ definition and analysis to obtain valuable information for system enhancement, the sharing issue that advocates for a common definition of indicators across the teams and, as a consequence, the need for shared applications that support and encourage such a rationalisation.