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arXiv · 2603.13796

PMIScore: An Unsupervised Approach to Quantify Dialogue Engagement

Yongkang Guo·Zhihuan Huang·Yuqing Kong
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Abstract

High dialogue engagement is a crucial indicator of an effective conversation. A reliable measure of engagement could help benchmark large language models, enhance the effectiveness of human-computer interactions, or improve personal communication skills. However, quantifying engagement is challenging, since it is subjective and lacks a "gold standard". This paper proposes PMIScore, an efficient unsupervised approach to quantify dialogue engagement. It uses pointwise mutual information (PMI), which is the probability of generating a response conditioning on the conversation history. Thus, PMIScore offers a clear interpretation of engagement. As directly computing PMI is intractable due to the complexity of dialogues, PMIScore learned it through a dual form of divergence. The algorithm includes generating positive and negative dialogue pairs, extracting embeddings by large language models (LLMs), and training a small neural network using a mutual information loss function. We validated PMIScore on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of PMIScore in PMI estimation and the reasonableness of the PMI metric itself.

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Yongkang Guo, Zhihuan Huang, Yuqing Kong. 2026-03-14. PMIScore: An Unsupervised Approach to Quantify Dialogue Engagement. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13796

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