Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization

Yu-Min Tseng, Yu-Chao Huang, Teng-Yun Hsiao, Wei-Lin Chen, Chao-Wei Huang, Yu Meng, Yun-Nung Chen


Abstract
The concept of *persona*, originally adopted in dialogue literature, has re-surged as a promising framework for tailoring large language models (LLMs) to specific context (*e.g.*, personalized search, LLM-as-a-judge). However, the growing research on leveraging persona in LLMs is relatively disorganized and lacks a systematic taxonomy. To close the gap, we present a comprehensive survey to categorize the current state of the field. We identify two lines of research, namely (1) *LLM Role-Playing*, where personas are assigned to LLMs, and (2) *LLM Personalization*, where LLMs take care of user personas. Additionally, we introduce existing methods for LLM personality evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first survey for role-playing and personalization in LLMs under the unified view of persona. We continuously maintain a paper collection to foster future endeavors.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.969
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16612–16631
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.969
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.969
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yu-Min Tseng, Yu-Chao Huang, Teng-Yun Hsiao, Wei-Lin Chen, Chao-Wei Huang, Yu Meng, and Yun-Nung Chen. 2024. Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 16612–16631, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization (Tseng et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.969.pdf