TAPS: Tool-Augmented Personalisation via Structured Tagging

Ekaterina Taktasheva, Jeff Dalton


Abstract
Recent advancements in tool-augmented large language models have enabled them to interact with external tools, enhancing their ability to perform complex user tasks. However, existing approaches overlook the role of personalisation in guiding tool use. This work investigates how user preferences can be effectively integrated into goal-oriented dialogue agents. Through extensive analysis, we identify key weaknesses in the ability of LLMs to personalise tool use. To this end, we introduce TAPS, a novel solution that enhances personalised tool use by leveraging a structured tagging tool and an uncertainty-based tool detector. TAPS significantly improves the ability of LLMs to incorporate user preferences, achieving the new state-of-the-art for open source models on the NLSI task.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1200
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
23530–23555
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1200/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ekaterina Taktasheva and Jeff Dalton. 2025. TAPS: Tool-Augmented Personalisation via Structured Tagging. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 23530–23555, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TAPS: Tool-Augmented Personalisation via Structured Tagging (Taktasheva & Dalton, EMNLP 2025)
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