We present a novel approach to conversational agent evaluation using Persona-driven User Simulations based on Large Language Models (LLMs). Our methodology first uses LLMs to generate diverse customer personas, which are then used to configure a single LLM-based user simulator. This simulator evaluates SalesBot 2.0, a proactive conversational sales agent. We introduce a dataset of these personas, along with corresponding goals and conversation scenarios, enabling comprehensive testing across different customer types with varying assertiveness levels and precision of needs. Our evaluation framework assesses both the simulator’s adherence to persona instructions and the bot’s performance across multiple dimensions, combining human annotation with LLM-as-a-judge assessments using commercial and open-source models. Results demonstrate that our LLM-based simulator effectively emulates nuanced customer roles, and that cross-selling strategies can be implemented with minimal impact on customer satisfaction, varying by customer type.

Large language models (LLMs) gained immense popularity due to their impressive capabilities in unstructured conversations. Empowering LLMs with advanced prompting strategies such as reasoning and acting (ReAct) (Yao et al., 2022) has shown promise in solving complex tasks traditionally requiring reinforcement learning. In this work, we apply the ReAct strategy to guide LLMs performing task-oriented dialogue (TOD). We evaluate ReAct-based LLMs (ReAct-LLMs) both in simulation and with real users. While ReAct-LLMs severely underperform state-of-the-art approaches on success rate in simulation, this difference becomes less pronounced in human evaluation. Moreover, compared to the baseline, humans report higher subjective satisfaction with ReAct-LLM despite its lower success rate, most likely thanks to its natural and confidently phrased responses.

This paper focuses on the generation of natural language questions based on SPARQL queries, with an emphasis on conversational use cases (follow-up question-answering). It studies what can be achieved so far based on current deep learning models (namely pretrained T5 and BART models). To do so, 4 knowledge-based QA corpora have been homogenized for the task and a new challenge set is introduced. A first series of experiments analyzes the impact of different training setups, while a second series seeks to understand what is still difficult for these models. The results from automatic metrics and human evaluation show that simple questions and frequent templates of SPARQL queries are usually well processed whereas complex questions and conversational dimensions (coreferences and ellipses) are still difficult to handle. The experimental material is publicly available on https://github.com/Orange-OpenSource/sparql-to-text .