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Prompting and Evaluating Large Language Models for Proactive Dialogues: Clarification, Target-guided, and Non-collaboration (2305.13626v2)

Published 23 May 2023 in cs.CL

Abstract: Conversational systems based on LLMs, such as ChatGPT, show exceptional proficiency in context understanding and response generation. However, despite their impressive capabilities, they still possess limitations, such as providing randomly-guessed answers to ambiguous queries or failing to refuse users' requests, both of which are considered aspects of a conversational agent's proactivity. This raises the question of whether LLM-based conversational systems are equipped to handle proactive dialogue problems. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of LLM-based conversational systems, specifically focusing on three aspects of proactive dialogue systems: clarification, target-guided, and non-collaborative dialogues. To trigger the proactivity of LLMs, we propose the Proactive Chain-of-Thought prompting scheme, which augments LLMs with the goal planning capability over descriptive reasoning chains. Empirical findings are discussed to promote future studies on LLM-based proactive dialogue systems.

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Authors (6)
  1. Yang Deng (113 papers)
  2. Lizi Liao (44 papers)
  3. Liang Chen (360 papers)
  4. Hongru Wang (62 papers)
  5. Wenqiang Lei (66 papers)
  6. Tat-Seng Chua (359 papers)
Citations (51)