@inproceedings{mitra-etal-2026-recap,
    title = "{RECAP}: {RE}writing Conversations for Intent Understanding in Agentic Planning",
    author = "Mitra, Kushan  and
      Zhang, Dan  and
      Kim, Hannah  and
      Hruschka, Estevam",
    editor = "Demberg, Vera  and
      Inui, Kentaro  and
      Marquez, Llu{\'i}s",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {EACL} 2026",
    month = mar,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Rabat, Morocco",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.findings-eacl.105/",
    pages = "2015--2033",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-386-9",
    abstract = "Understanding user intent is essential for effective planning in conversational assistants, particularly those powered by large language models (LLMs) coordinating multiple agents. However, real-world dialogues are often ambiguous, underspecified, or dynamic, making intent understanding a persistent challenge. Traditional classification-based approaches struggle to generalize in open-ended settings, leading to brittle interpretations and poor downstream planning.We propose RECAP (REwriting Conversations for Agent Planning), a new benchmark designed to evaluate and advance intent rewriting, reframing user-agent dialogues into concise representations of user goals. RECAP captures diverse challenges such as ambiguity, intent drift, vagueness, and mixed-goal conversations. Alongside the dataset, we introduce an LLM-based evaluator that compares planning utility given a user-agent dialogue.Using RECAP, we develop a prompt-based rewriting approach that outperforms baselines, in terms of plan preference. We further demonstrate that fine-tuning two DPO-based rewriters yields additional utility gains. Our results highlight intent rewriting as a critical and tractable component for improving agentic planning in open-domain dialogue systems."
}