Colloquial Singaporean English (Singlish) is an informal English marked by a unique blend of languages reflecting Singapore’s multicultural identity. Style transfer between Singlish and Standard (formal) English is vital for various applications, yet existing methods often lack explainability and fine-grained control. To fill this gap, we contribute in two key ways. First, we construct a large, high-quality dataset of formal and informal sentences, annotated across six linguistic aspects—Syntax, Lexical Borrowing, Pragmatics, Prosody/Phonology, Emoticons/Punctuation, and Code-Switching—with detailed explanations. Starting with manually annotated cases, we scaled the dataset to 140K with ensured quality. Second, inspired by the “Society of Mind” theory, we propose a novel multi-agent framework where large language models (LLMs) act as expert agents for each linguistic aspect. These agents collaborate by iteratively generating, critiquing, and refining responses to achieve controlled, explainable style transfer. Both automatic metrics and human evaluations confirm that our method enables precise, interpretable transformations, advancing explainability in NLP for Singlish.

Understanding user intentions in multi-turn dialogues is critical for conversational AI, yet existing approaches—relying on rigid slot-value structures or unstructured free-text—fail to fully capture conversational complexity. In this paper, we propose IntentionFrame, a semi-structured framework inspired by psychological and cognitive intention theories, which organizes conversational intents into four interrelated aspects: situation, emotion, action, and knowledge. This design not only retains interpretability but also provides LLMs with a rich context to accurately parse and respond to nuanced user inputs. To efficiently scale IntentionFrame annotations, we introduce a Weakly-supervised Reinforced Generation (WeRG) method that leverages a small set of high-quality human annotations in conjunction with abundant coarsely labeled data. By applying reinforcement learning to balance these diverse signals, WeRG aims to effectively generate reliable IntentionFrame annotations, which serve as essential grounding for downstream tasks—leading to substantial improvements in response generation and task completion. Our experiments, supported by both automatic metrics and human evaluations, show that integrating IntentionFrame with WeRG significantly improves LLMs’ conversational understanding and sets a new benchmark for intent analysis.