In this paper, we propose a dialogue control management framework using large language models for semi-structured interviews. Specifically, large language models are used to generate the interviewer’s utterances and to make conditional branching decisions based on the understanding of the interviewee’s responses. The framework enables flexible dialogue control in interview conversations by generating and updating slots and values according to interviewee answers. More importantly, we invented through LLMs’ prompt tuning the framework of accumulating the list of slots generated along the course of incrementing the number of interviewees through the semi-structured interviews. Evaluation results showed that the proposed approach of accumulating the list of generated slots throughout the semi-structured interviews outperform the baseline without accumulating generated slots in terms of the number of persona attributes and values collected through the semi-structured interview.

Survey research using open-ended responses is an important method thatcontributes to the discovery of unknown issues and new needs. However,survey research generally requires time and cost-consuming manual dataprocessing, indicating that it is difficult to analyze large dataset.To address this issue, we propose an LLM-based method to automate partsof the grounded theory approach (GTA), a representative approach of thequalitative data analysis. We generated and annotated pseudo open-endedresponses, and used them as the training data for the coding proceduresof GTA. Through evaluations, we showed that the models trained withpseudo open-ended responses are quite effective compared with thosetrained with manually annotated open-ended responses. We alsodemonstrate that the LLM-based approach is highly efficient andcost-saving compared to human-based approach.