An LLM Feature-based Framework for Dialogue Constructiveness Assessment

Lexin Zhou, Youmna Farag, Andreas Vlachos


Abstract
Research on dialogue constructiveness assessment focuses on (i) analysing conversational factors that influence individuals to take specific actions, win debates, change their perspectives or broaden their open-mindedness and (ii) predicting constructiveness outcomes following dialogues for such use cases. These objectives can be achieved by training either interpretable feature-based models (which often involve costly human annotations) or neural models such as pre-trained language models (which have empirically shown higher task accuracy but lack interpretability). In this paper we propose an LLM feature-based framework for dialogue constructiveness assessment that combines the strengths of feature-based and neural approaches, while mitigating their downsides. The framework first defines a set of dataset-independent and interpretable linguistic features, which can be extracted by both prompting an LLM and simple heuristics. Such features are then used to train LLM feature-based models. We apply this framework to three datasets of dialogue constructiveness and find that our LLM feature-based models outperform or performs at least as well as standard feature-based models and neural models. We also find that the LLM feature-based model learns more robust prediction rules instead of relying on superficial shortcuts, which often trouble neural models.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.308
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5389–5409
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.308/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.308
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lexin Zhou, Youmna Farag, and Andreas Vlachos. 2024. An LLM Feature-based Framework for Dialogue Constructiveness Assessment. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5389–5409, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An LLM Feature-based Framework for Dialogue Constructiveness Assessment (Zhou et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.308.pdf