The AI interviewer: multi-faceted evaluation of adaptive questioning by large language models
摘要
Large language models are increasingly deployed as adaptive interviewers in qualitative research and human-computer interaction, yet systematic evaluation of their interviewing behavior remains limited. We introduce a modular LLM agent for conducting semi-structured psychological interviews and present a controlled, multi-faceted evaluation protocol to assess interviewer quality across six state-of-the-art models: Claude Sonnet 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-5 Chat, Grok 4, Qwen3-235B A22B, and DeepSeek Chat V3.1. The agent conducts adaptive interviews over 54 main questions spanning biography, family, interests, challenges, values, work, and health, deciding for each response whether a follow-up is warranted and generating tailored follow-up questions. To enable fair comparison, we standardize interview context using transcripts from ten baseline human interviews, execute all models under identical orchestration and prompts, and use a single LLM interviewee to eliminate human response variability. Expert psycholinguists evaluate interviewer behavior on five binary criteria: benevolence (empathic tone), necessity, context-awareness, openness, and justified skip (when follow-ups are unnecessary), annotating over 2900 items with high inter-rater reliability (Fleiss