Beyond Discrete Personas: Personality Modeling Through Journal Intensive Conversations

Sayantan Pal, Souvik Das, Rohini K. Srihari


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved personalized conversational capabilities. However, existing datasets like Persona Chat, Synthetic Persona Chat, and Blended Skill Talk rely on static, predefined personas. This approach often results in dialogues that fail to capture human personalities’ fluid and evolving nature. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel dataset with around 400,000 dialogues and a framework for generating personalized conversations using long-form journal entries from Reddit. Our approach clusters journal entries for each author and filters them by selecting the most representative cluster, ensuring that the retained entries best reflect the author’s personality. We further refine the data by capturing the Big Five personality traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—ensuring that dialogues authentically reflect an individual’s personality. Using Llama 3 70B, we generate high-quality, personality-rich dialogues grounded in these journal entries. Fine-tuning models on this dataset leads to an 11% improvement in capturing personality traits on average, outperforming existing approaches in generating more coherent and personality-driven dialogues.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.470
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7055–7074
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.470/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sayantan Pal, Souvik Das, and Rohini K. Srihari. 2025. Beyond Discrete Personas: Personality Modeling Through Journal Intensive Conversations. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 7055–7074, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Beyond Discrete Personas: Personality Modeling Through Journal Intensive Conversations (Pal et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.470.pdf