1. A computer-implemented method for automatic assessment of machine generated responses, said method comprising: extracting candidate context-message-response n-tuples, by an extraction component of a computing device, from at least one source of conversational data to form a set of multi-reference responses, a response in the set of multi-reference responses comprising a selected context-message data pair and a rating for the response relative to the selected context-message data pair; calculating an assessment metric, by at least one processor, based on a selected machine-generated response and the set of multi-reference responses; and generating a metric score based on the assessment metric, by the at least one processor, the metric score indicating a quality of the selected machine-generated response relative to the selected context-message data pair associated with the selected machine-generated response.