Enhancing Goal-oriented Proactive Dialogue Systems via Consistency Reflection and Correction

Didi Zhang, Yaxin Fan, Peifeng Li, Qiaoming Zhu


Abstract
Goal-oriented proactive dialogue systems are designed to guide user conversations seamlessly towards specific objectives by planning a goal-oriented path. However, previous research has focused predominantly on optimizing these paths while neglecting the inconsistencies that may arise between generated responses and dialogue contexts, including user profiles, dialogue history, domain knowledge, and subgoals. To address this issue, we introduce a model-agnostic two-stage Consistency Reflection and Correction (CRC) framework. Specifically, in the consistency reflection stage, the model is prompted to reflect on the discrepancies between generated responses and dialogue contexts, identifying inconsistencies and suggesting possible corrections. In the consistency correction stage, the model generates responses that are more consistent with the dialogue context based on these reflection results. We conducted experiments on various model architectures with different parameter sizes, including encoder-decoder models (BART, T5) and decoder-only models (GPT-2, DialoGPT, Phi3, Mistral and LLaMA3), and the experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that our CRC framework significantly improves the consistency between generated responses and dialogue contexts.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.1050
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
21656–21672
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1050/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Didi Zhang, Yaxin Fan, Peifeng Li, and Qiaoming Zhu. 2025. Enhancing Goal-oriented Proactive Dialogue Systems via Consistency Reflection and Correction. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 21656–21672, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Goal-oriented Proactive Dialogue Systems via Consistency Reflection and Correction (Zhang et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1050.pdf