English

Role-Play Zero-Shot Prompting with Large Language Models for Open-Domain Human-Machine Conversation

Computation and Language 2024-07-02 v1 Artificial Intelligence Human-Computer Interaction

Abstract

Recently, various methods have been proposed to create open-domain conversational agents with Large Language Models (LLMs). These models are able to answer user queries, but in a one-way Q&A format rather than a true conversation. Fine-tuning on particular datasets is the usual way to modify their style to increase conversational ability, but this is expensive and usually only available in a few languages. In this study, we explore role-play zero-shot prompting as an efficient and cost-effective solution for open-domain conversation, using capable multilingual LLMs (Beeching et al., 2023) trained to obey instructions. We design a prompting system that, when combined with an instruction-following model - here Vicuna (Chiang et al., 2023) - produces conversational agents that match and even surpass fine-tuned models in human evaluation in French in two different tasks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.18460,
  title  = {Role-Play Zero-Shot Prompting with Large Language Models for Open-Domain Human-Machine Conversation},
  author = {Ahmed Njifenjou and Virgile Sucal and Bassam Jabaian and Fabrice Lefèvre},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.18460},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Updated version of a paper originally submitted at SIGDIAL 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:20:07.519Z