Personality-Guided Code Generation Using Large Language Models

Yaoqi Guo, Zhenpeng Chen, Jie M. Zhang, Yang Liu, Yun Ma


Abstract
Code generation, the automatic creation of source code from natural language descriptions, has garnered significant attention due to its potential to streamline software development. Inspired by research that links task-personality alignment with improved development outcomes, we conduct an empirical study on personality-guided code generation using large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we investigate how emulating personality traits appropriate to the coding tasks affects LLM performance. We extensively evaluate this approach using seven widely adopted LLMs across four representative datasets. Our results show that personality guidance significantly enhances code generation accuracy, with improved pass rates in 23 out of 28 LLM-dataset combinations. Notably, in 11 cases, the improvement exceeds 5%, and in 5 instances, it surpasses 10%, with the highest gain reaching 12.9%. Additionally, personality guidance can be easily integrated with other prompting strategies to further boost performance.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.54
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:
1068–1080
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.54/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yaoqi Guo, Zhenpeng Chen, Jie M. Zhang, Yang Liu, and Yun Ma. 2025. Personality-Guided Code Generation Using Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1068–1080, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Personality-Guided Code Generation Using Large Language Models (Guo et al., ACL 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.54.pdf