Traditional Dialogue State Tracking (DST) has focused on tracking preferences and intents in conversations centered around specific tasks (e.g. booking services). These conventional systems assume a relatively restricted conversation flow in which each turn gradually offers new information. However, advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have ushered in more versatile open-domain chat systems in which extended dialogue sessions encompassing numerous tasks and topics are common—in turn requiring new conversational tracking tools in order to successfully orchestrate such systems. Addressing these challenges, we introduce a novel approach combining dialogue segmentation and state tracking within open-domain dialogues, tailored for zero-shot applications appropriate to a true open-domain dialogue system. Our proposed method S3-DST employs a unique structured prompting technique and *Pre-Analytical Recollection*, a novel grounding mechanism we designed for improving long context tracking. Tested on proprietary anonymized open-domain dialogue datasets as well as publicly available DST and segmentation datasets, S3-DST consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art, showcasing its effectiveness and adaptability state tracking in the next wave of LLM-based chat systems. We also release S3-DST annotations with GPT-4 on a curated subset of LMSYS-Chat-1M to be used as a testbed to fuel research in this direction.

Accurate and interpretable user satisfaction estimation (USE) is critical for understanding, evaluating, and continuously improving conversational systems. Users express their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with diverse conversational patterns in both general-purpose (ChatGPT and Bing Copilot) and task-oriented (customer service chatbot) conversational systems. Existing approaches based on featurized ML models or text embeddings fall short in extracting generalizable patterns and are hard to interpret. In this work, we show that LLMs can extract interpretable signals of user satisfaction from their natural language utterances more effectively than embedding-based approaches. Moreover, an LLM can be tailored for USE via an iterative prompting framework using supervision from labeled examples. Our proposed method, Supervised Prompting for User satisfaction Rubrics (SPUR), not only has higher accuracy but is more interpretable as it scores user satisfaction via learned rubrics with a detailed breakdown.

This paper presents computational approaches for automatically detecting critical plot twists in reviews of media products. First, we created a large-scale book review dataset that includes fine-grained spoiler annotations at the sentence-level, as well as book and (anonymized) user information. Second, we carefully analyzed this dataset, and found that: spoiler language tends to be book-specific; spoiler distributions vary greatly across books and review authors; and spoiler sentences tend to jointly appear in the latter part of reviews. Third, inspired by these findings, we developed an end-to-end neural network architecture to detect spoiler sentences in review corpora. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that the proposed method substantially outperforms existing baselines.