Awkward Silence?  The Evaluation of Social Dialogue Systems

Non-goal orientated dialogue systems can provide users with key information, support decision making, facilitate user action or simply chat for the sake of having some company. The key question is how do we define what it means to be an engaging conversationalist and how can we measure this automatically?  This talk will take a multidisciplinary approach to evaluating data-driven, non-goal orientated dialogue systems, taking insights from the gaming industry, HCI, psychology and cognitive theory.