Benchmarking LLM powered Chatbots: Methods and Metrics

Abstract: Autonomous conversational agents, i.e. chatbots, are becoming an increasingly common mechanism for enterprises to provide support to customers and partners. In order to rate chatbots, especially ones powered by Generative AI tools like Large Language Models (LLMs) we need to be able to accurately assess their performance. This is where chatbot benchmarking becomes important. In this paper, we propose the use of a novel benchmark that we call the E2E (End to End) benchmark, and show how the E2E benchmark can be used to evaluate accuracy and usefulness of the answers provided by chatbots, especially ones powered by LLMs. We evaluate an example chatbot at different levels of sophistication based on both our E2E benchmark, as well as other available metrics commonly used in the state of art, and observe that the proposed benchmark show better results compared to others. In addition, while some metrics proved to be unpredictable, the metric associated with the E2E benchmark, which uses cosine similarity performed well in evaluating chatbots. The performance of our best models shows that there are several benefits of using the cosine similarity score as a metric in the E2E benchmark.