@inproceedings{shin-etal-2026-controlling,
title = "Controlling and Assessing Appropriate Persona Use in {LLM}-based Dialogue Generation",
author = "Shin, Jongkyung and
Lee, Inkyu and
Lim, Chiehyeon",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2029/",
pages = "46212--46239",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
abstract = "In persona-based dialogue generation (PDG), LLMs often overuse persona attributes by incorporating them regardless of dialogue context, resulting in unnatural responses. Despite its practical significance, the underlying causes remain unexplored, with no method to mitigate this problem or metric to assess the appropriateness of persona use. To address these issues, we first conduct a comprehensive analysis of LLM-based PDG, revealing that LLMs exhibit a systematic bias to incorporate all given persona attributes, and that existing metrics fail to capture contextual appropriateness. Building on these findings, we propose Self-CONtrastive Persona Overuse Suppression (SCONPOS) to mitigate overuse by directly intervening in LLMs' internal representations at the prompt encoding stage, without requiring any response generation. We further propose the Persona Appropriateness Score (PAS), a novel metric that penalizes both overuse and underuse. Experimental results demonstrate that SCONPOS systematically reduces the overuse, and PAS captures the contextual appropriateness of persona use."
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<abstract>In persona-based dialogue generation (PDG), LLMs often overuse persona attributes by incorporating them regardless of dialogue context, resulting in unnatural responses. Despite its practical significance, the underlying causes remain unexplored, with no method to mitigate this problem or metric to assess the appropriateness of persona use. To address these issues, we first conduct a comprehensive analysis of LLM-based PDG, revealing that LLMs exhibit a systematic bias to incorporate all given persona attributes, and that existing metrics fail to capture contextual appropriateness. Building on these findings, we propose Self-CONtrastive Persona Overuse Suppression (SCONPOS) to mitigate overuse by directly intervening in LLMs’ internal representations at the prompt encoding stage, without requiring any response generation. We further propose the Persona Appropriateness Score (PAS), a novel metric that penalizes both overuse and underuse. Experimental results demonstrate that SCONPOS systematically reduces the overuse, and PAS captures the contextual appropriateness of persona use.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Controlling and Assessing Appropriate Persona Use in LLM-based Dialogue Generation
%A Shin, Jongkyung
%A Lee, Inkyu
%A Lim, Chiehyeon
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F shin-etal-2026-controlling
%X In persona-based dialogue generation (PDG), LLMs often overuse persona attributes by incorporating them regardless of dialogue context, resulting in unnatural responses. Despite its practical significance, the underlying causes remain unexplored, with no method to mitigate this problem or metric to assess the appropriateness of persona use. To address these issues, we first conduct a comprehensive analysis of LLM-based PDG, revealing that LLMs exhibit a systematic bias to incorporate all given persona attributes, and that existing metrics fail to capture contextual appropriateness. Building on these findings, we propose Self-CONtrastive Persona Overuse Suppression (SCONPOS) to mitigate overuse by directly intervening in LLMs’ internal representations at the prompt encoding stage, without requiring any response generation. We further propose the Persona Appropriateness Score (PAS), a novel metric that penalizes both overuse and underuse. Experimental results demonstrate that SCONPOS systematically reduces the overuse, and PAS captures the contextual appropriateness of persona use.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2029/
%P 46212-46239
Markdown (Informal)
[Controlling and Assessing Appropriate Persona Use in LLM-based Dialogue Generation](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.2029/) (Shin et al., EMNLP 2026)
ACL