Jiahui Xu
2025
CATCH: A Controllable Theme Detection Framework with Contextualized Clustering and Hierarchical Generation
Rui Ke
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Jiahui Xu
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Kuang Wang
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Shenghao Yang
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Feng Jiang
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Haizhou Li
Proceedings of the Twelfth Dialog System Technology Challenge
Theme detection is a fundamental task in user-centric dialogue systems, aiming to identify the latent topic of each utterance without relying on predefined schemas. Unlike intent induction, which operates within fixed label spaces, theme detection requires cross-dialogue consistency and alignment with personalized user preferences, posing significant challenges. Existing methods often struggle with sparse, short utterances and fail to capture user-level thematic preferences across dialogues. To address these challenges, we propose CATCH (Controllable Theme Detection with Contextualized Clustering and Hierarchical Generation), a unified framework that integrates three core components: (1) context-aware topic representation, which enriches utterance-level semantics using surrounding topic segments; (2) preference-guided topic clustering, which jointly models semantic proximity and personalized feedback to align themes across conversations; and (3) a hierarchical theme generation mechanism designed to suppress noise and produce robust, coherent topic labels. Experiments on a multi-domain customer dialogue benchmark demonstrate that CATCH achieves state-of-the-art performance in both theme classification and topic distribution quality. Notably, it ranked second in the official blind evaluation of the DSTC-12 Controllable Theme Detection Track, showcasing its effectiveness and generalizability in real-world dialogue systems.