Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems are designed to fulfill user requests through natural language interactions, yet existing systems often produce generic, monotonic responses that lack individuality and fail to adapt to users’ personal attributes. To address this, we introduce PicPersona-TOD, a novel dataset that incorporates user images as part of the persona, enabling personalized responses tailored to user-specific factors such as age or emotional context. This is facilitated by first impressions, dialogue policy-guided prompting, and the use of external knowledge to reduce hallucinations. Human evaluations confirm that our dataset enhances user experience, with personalized responses contributing to a more engaging interaction. Additionally, we introduce a new NLG model, Pictor, which not only personalizes responses, but also demonstrates robust performance across unseen domains.

Dialogue systems for mental health care aim to provide appropriate support to individuals experiencing mental distress. While extensive research has been conducted to deliver adequate emotional support, existing studies cannot identify individuals who require professional medical intervention and cannot offer suitable guidance. We introduce the Diagnostic Emotional Support Conversation task for an advanced mental health management system. We develop the DESC dataset to assess depression symptoms while maintaining user experience by utilizing task-specific utterance generation prompts and a strict filtering algorithm. Evaluations by professional psychological counselors indicate that DESC has a superior ability to diagnose depression than existing data. Additionally, conversational quality evaluation reveals that DESC maintains fluent, consistent, and coherent dialogues.

We present our work on Track 2 in the Dialog System Technology Challenges 11 (DSTC11). DSTC11-Track2 aims to provide a benchmark for zero-shot, cross-domain, intent-set induction. In the absence of in-domain training dataset, robust utterance representation that can be used across domains is necessary to induce users’ intentions. To achieve this, we leveraged a multi-domain dialogue dataset to fine-tune the language model and proposed extracting Verb-Object pairs to remove the artifacts of unnecessary information. Furthermore, we devised the method that generates each cluster’s name for the explainability of clustered results. Our approach achieved 3rd place in the precision score and showed superior accuracy and normalized mutual information (NMI) score than the baseline model on various domain datasets.