How do you measure your Dialogflow bot’s accuracy

Byaravindmc

Dialogflow Accuracy

A while back, I wrote a post which linked to Chatbase’s UMM method which provides a way to reason about your chatbot’s accuracy. While it is a good idea and I do derive some ideas from it, it is not particularly useful because there isn’t any way to measure the accuracy using the UMM method.

What I am proposing here is much simpler.

The confusion matrix

You may be familiar with the term error matrix or confusion matrix. If not, don’t worry!

It is a way to measure if classification techniques work well, and it is quite appropriate in this case because under the hood, Dialogflow takes the user’s input and classifies it to the nearest matching intent.

So let us define the following terms:

Regular intent = An intent which is not a fallback intent

Correct mapping = the user’s phrase was mapped to the expected, appropriate intent. By the way, if you find the idea of “correct mapping” subjective rather than objective, you probably need to improve the way you are defining your intents.

True Positive (TP) = A user phrase is mapped to a regular intent correctly

True Negative (TN) = A user phrase is mapped to a fallback intent correctly (this means, we haven’t yet declared an intent to handle the user’s phrase)

False Positive (FP) = A regular intent is triggered, but it should have either been mapped to a different regular intent, or it should have been mapped to the fallback intent because we don’t yet handle the phrase. Instead it is wrongly mapped to a regular intent.

False Negative (FN) = A fallback intent is triggered, but we actually have already defined a regular intent which should have been mapped to the user’s phrase. An excellent example of this is when the user types a message which is nearly identical to a training phrase except for a small typo.

Here is a little flowchart you can use as a reference:

Sample size

Consider the last 100 user messages to your bot. If you don’t have that many, get some 10 or 15 beta testers to try out your bot for a few minutes.

Let TP be the number (out of the 100) messages which were true positive mappings.

Similarly, TN = number of true negative mappings

FP = number of false positive mappings

FN = number of false negative mappings

Let Correct Mapping (CM) = TP + TN

Let Incorrect Mapping (IM) = FP + FN

Accuracy = CM / CM + IM

Since CM + IM = 100 (if you got the correct sample size), the value is already a percentage.

If you want to do comparative evaluation over time, another option is to choose a specific time range during a given week – e.g. Tuesday from 8 AM to 8 PM. This way you can get some sort of similarity across different conversations for which you are calculating the accuracy.

Note: This is my old website and is in maintenance mode. I am publishing new articles only on my new website. 

If you are not sure where to start on my new website, I recommend the following article:

Is Dialogflow still relevant in the era of Large Language Models?

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