@inproceedings{yang-etal-2026-stephanie2,
title = "{S}tephanie2: Thinking, Waiting, and Making Decisions Like Humans in Step-by-Step {AI} Social Chat",
author = "Yang, Hao and
Lu, Hongyuan and
Yang, Dingkang and
Yang, Wenliang and
Sun, Peng and
Zuo, Wei and
Zhang, Xiaochuan and
Xiao, Jun and
He, Kefan and
Lam, Wai and
Liu, Yang and
Zeng, Xinhua",
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.501/",
pages = "11505--11522",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
abstract = "Instant-messaging human social chat typically progresses through a sequence of short messages. Existing step-by-step AI chatting systems typically split a one-shot generation into multiple messages and send them sequentially, but they lack an active waiting mechanism and exhibit unnatural message pacing. In order to address these issues, we propose Stephanie2, a new step-wise decision-making dialogue agent. With active waiting and message-pace adaptation, Stephanie2 explicitly decides at each step whether to send or wait, and models latency as the sum of thinking time and typing time to achieve more natural pacing. We further introduce a dual-agent dialogue system to generate pseudo dialogue histories for human and automatic evaluations. Experiments show that Stephanie2 clearly outperforms Stephanie1 on metrics such as naturalness and engagement, and achieves a higher pass rate on human evaluation with the role identification test."
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Stephanie2: Thinking, Waiting, and Making Decisions Like Humans in Step-by-Step AI Social Chat
%A Yang, Hao
%A Lu, Hongyuan
%A Yang, Dingkang
%A Yang, Wenliang
%A Sun, Peng
%A Zuo, Wei
%A Zhang, Xiaochuan
%A Xiao, Jun
%A He, Kefan
%A Lam, Wai
%A Liu, Yang
%A Zeng, Xinhua
%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 yang-etal-2026-stephanie2
%X Instant-messaging human social chat typically progresses through a sequence of short messages. Existing step-by-step AI chatting systems typically split a one-shot generation into multiple messages and send them sequentially, but they lack an active waiting mechanism and exhibit unnatural message pacing. In order to address these issues, we propose Stephanie2, a new step-wise decision-making dialogue agent. With active waiting and message-pace adaptation, Stephanie2 explicitly decides at each step whether to send or wait, and models latency as the sum of thinking time and typing time to achieve more natural pacing. We further introduce a dual-agent dialogue system to generate pseudo dialogue histories for human and automatic evaluations. Experiments show that Stephanie2 clearly outperforms Stephanie1 on metrics such as naturalness and engagement, and achieves a higher pass rate on human evaluation with the role identification test.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.501/
%P 11505-11522
Markdown (Informal)
[Stephanie2: Thinking, Waiting, and Making Decisions Like Humans in Step-by-Step AI Social Chat](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.501/) (Yang et al., EMNLP 2026)
ACL
- Hao Yang, Hongyuan Lu, Dingkang Yang, Wenliang Yang, Peng Sun, Wei Zuo, Xiaochuan Zhang, Jun Xiao, Kefan He, Wai Lam, Yang Liu, and Xinhua Zeng. 2026. Stephanie2: Thinking, Waiting, and Making Decisions Like Humans in Step-by-Step AI Social Chat. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 11505–11522, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.