Xinhua Zeng


2025

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Stephanie: Step-by-Step Dialogues for Mimicking Human Interactions in Social Conversations
Hao Yang | Hongyuan Lu | Xinhua Zeng | Yang Liu | Xiang Zhang | Haoran Yang | Yumeng Zhang | Shan Huang | Yiran Wei | Wai Lam
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025

In the rapidly evolving field of natural language processing, dialogue systems primarily employ a single-step dialogue paradigm. Although this paradigm is commonly adopted, it lacks the depth and fluidity of human interactions and does not appear natural. We introduce a novel **Step**-by-Step Dialogue Paradigm (Stephanie), designed to mimic the ongoing dynamic nature of human conversations. By employing a dual learning strategy and a further-split post-editing method, we generated and utilized a high-quality step-by-step dialogue dataset to fine-tune existing large language models, enabling them to perform step-by-step dialogues. We thoroughly present Stephanie. Tailored automatic and human evaluations are conducted to assess its effectiveness compared to the traditional single-step dialogue paradigm. We will release code, Stephanie datasets, and Stephanie LLMs to facilitate the future of chatbot eras.