DEMO: Reframing Dialogue Interaction with Fine-grained Element Modeling

Minzheng Wang, Xinghua Zhang, Kun Chen, Nan Xu, Haiyang Yu, Fei Huang, Wenji Mao, Yongbin Li


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) enabled dialogue systems have become one of the central modes in human-machine interaction, which bring about vast amounts of conversation logs and increasing demand for dialogue generation. The dialogue’s life-cycle spans from Prelude through Interlocution to Epilogue, encompassing rich dialogue elements. Despite large volumes of dialogue-related studies, there is a lack of systematic investigation into the dialogue stages to frame benchmark construction that covers comprehensive dialogue elements. This hinders the precise modeling, generation and assessment of LLMs-based dialogue systems. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we introduce a new research task—Dialogue Element MOdeling, including Element Awareness and Dialogue Agent Interaction, and propose a novel benchmark, DEMO, designed for a comprehensive dialogue modeling and assessment. On this basis, we further build the DEMO agent with the adept ability to model dialogue elements via imitation learning. Extensive experiments on DEMO indicate that current representative LLMs still have considerable potential for enhancement, and our DEMO agent performs well in both dialogue element modeling and out-of-domain tasks.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.594
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
11373–11401
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.594/
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Cite (ACL):
Minzheng Wang, Xinghua Zhang, Kun Chen, Nan Xu, Haiyang Yu, Fei Huang, Wenji Mao, and Yongbin Li. 2025. DEMO: Reframing Dialogue Interaction with Fine-grained Element Modeling. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 11373–11401, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DEMO: Reframing Dialogue Interaction with Fine-grained Element Modeling (Wang et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.594.pdf