Do Large Language Models Need Intent? Revisiting Response Generation Strategies for Service Assistant
This addresses a fundamental design dilemma for conversational AI systems, offering actionable guidelines for more efficient service response generation, though it appears incremental as it revisits existing paradigms.
The paper tackled whether explicit intent recognition is necessary for generating high-quality service responses by comparing Intent-First and Direct Response Generation paradigms using state-of-the-art language models on two datasets. The results revealed surprising insights into the redundancy of intent modeling, challenging conventional assumptions in conversational AI pipelines.
In the era of conversational AI, generating accurate and contextually appropriate service responses remains a critical challenge. A central question remains: Is explicit intent recognition a prerequisite for generating high-quality service responses, or can models bypass this step and produce effective replies directly? This paper conducts a rigorous comparative study to address this fundamental design dilemma. Leveraging two publicly available service interaction datasets, we benchmark several state-of-the-art language models, including a fine-tuned T5 variant, across both paradigms: Intent-First Response Generation and Direct Response Generation. Evaluation metrics encompass both linguistic quality and task success rates, revealing surprising insights into the necessity or redundancy of explicit intent modelling. Our findings challenge conventional assumptions in conversational AI pipelines, offering actionable guidelines for designing more efficient and effective response generation systems.