LLM-guided Plan and Retrieval: A Strategic Alignment for Interpretable User Satisfaction Estimation in Dialogue

Sangyeop Kim, Sohhyung Park, Jaewon Jung, Jinseok Kim, Sungzoon Cho


Abstract
Understanding user satisfaction with conversational systems, known as User Satisfaction Estimation (USE), is essential for assessing dialogue quality and enhancing user experiences. However, existing methods for USE face challenges due to limited understanding of underlying reasons for user dissatisfaction and the high costs of annotating user intentions. To address these challenges, we propose PRAISE (Plan and Retrieval Alignment for Interpretable Satisfaction Estimation), an interpretable framework for effective user satisfaction prediction. PRAISE operates through three key modules. The Strategy Planner develops strategies, which are natural language criteria for classifying user satisfaction. The Feature Retriever then incorporates knowledge on user satisfaction from Large Language Models (LLMs) and retrieves relevance features from utterances. Finally, the Score Analyzer evaluates strategy predictions and classifies user satisfaction. Experimental results demonstrate that PRAISE achieves state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarks for the USE task. Beyond its superior performance, PRAISE offers additional benefits. It enhances interpretability by providing instance-level explanations through effective alignment of utterances with strategies. Moreover, PRAISE operates more efficiently than existing approaches by eliminating the need for LLMs during the inference phase.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-long.523
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10416–10430
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.523/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sangyeop Kim, Sohhyung Park, Jaewon Jung, Jinseok Kim, and Sungzoon Cho. 2025. LLM-guided Plan and Retrieval: A Strategic Alignment for Interpretable User Satisfaction Estimation in Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 10416–10430, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LLM-guided Plan and Retrieval: A Strategic Alignment for Interpretable User Satisfaction Estimation in Dialogue (Kim et al., NAACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-long.523.pdf