PACHAT: Persona-Aware Speech Assistant for Multi-party Dialogue

Dongjie Fu, Xize Cheng, Linjun Li, Xiaoda Yang, Lujia Yang, Tao Jin


Abstract
Extensive research on LLM-based spoken dialogue systems has significantly advanced the development of intelligent voice assistants. However, the integration of role information within speech remains an underexplored area, limiting its application in real-world scenarios, particularly in multi-party dialogue settings. With the growing demand for personalization, voice assistants that can recognize and remember users establish a deeper connection with them. We focus on enabling LLMs with speaker-awareness capabilities and enhancing their understanding of character settings through synthetic data to generate contextually appropriate responses. We introduce Persona-Dialogue, the first large-scale multi-party spoken dialogue dataset that incorporates speaker profiles. Based on this dataset, we propose PAChat, an architecture that simultaneously models both linguistic content and speaker features, allowing LLMs to map character settings to speaker identities in speech. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that PAChat successfully achieves speaker-specific responses, character understanding, and the generation of targeted replies in multi-party dialogue scenarios, surpassing existing spoken dialogue systems.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1492
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
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
29313–29330
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1492/
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Cite (ACL):
Dongjie Fu, Xize Cheng, Linjun Li, Xiaoda Yang, Lujia Yang, and Tao Jin. 2025. PACHAT: Persona-Aware Speech Assistant for Multi-party Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 29313–29330, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PACHAT: Persona-Aware Speech Assistant for Multi-party Dialogue (Fu et al., EMNLP 2025)
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