@article{mehri-etal-2026-goal,
    title = "Goal Alignment in {LLM}-Based User Simulators for Conversational {AI}",
    author = {Mehri, Shuhaib  and
      Yang, Xiaocheng  and
      Kim, Takyoung  and
      Tur, Gokhan  and
      Mehri, Shikib  and
      Hakkani-T{\"u}r, Dilek},
    journal = "Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    volume = "14",
    year = "2026",
    address = "Cambridge, MA",
    publisher = "MIT Press",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.tacl-1.38/",
    doi = "10.1162/tacl.a.687",
    pages = "852--876"
}