# A Survey of Personality, Persona, and Profile in Conversational Agents and Chatbots

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.00609 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00609/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 80 of its 200 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 80)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07864/) (2023)
- [Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06724/) (2015)
- [Personalizing Dialogue Agents: I have a dog, do you have pets too?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07243/) (2018)
- [Recipes for building an open-domain chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13637/) (2020)
- [How NOT To Evaluate Your Dialogue System: An Empirical Study of Unsupervised Evaluation Metrics for Dialogue Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08023/) (2016)
- [PromptSource: An Integrated Development Environment and Repository for Natural Language Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.01279/) (2022)
- [A Persona-Based Neural Conversation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06155/) (2016)
- [Incorporating Copying Mechanism in Sequence-to-Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06393/) (2016)
- [Persuasion for Good: Towards a Personalized Persuasive Dialogue System for Social Good](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.06725/) (2019)
- [A Neural Conversational Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.05869/) (2015)
- [TransferTransfo: A Transfer Learning Approach for Neural Network Based Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08149/) (2019)
- [DialogueGCN: A Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11540/) (2019)
- [The Second Conversational Intelligence Challenge (ConvAI2)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00098/) (2019)
- [The Design and Implementation of XiaoIce, an Empathetic Social Chatbot](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08989/) (2018)
- [Personality Traits in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00184/) (2023)
- [Emotional Chatting Machine: Emotional Conversation Generation with Internal and External Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01074/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning for Text Style Transfer: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00416/) (2020)
- [Recent Advances in Deep Learning Based Dialogue Systems: A Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04387/) (2021)
- [Training Millions of Personalized Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01984/) (2018)
- [Neural Responding Machine for Short-Text Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02364/) (2015)
- [Emotion Recognition in Conversation: Research Challenges, Datasets, and Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02947/) (2019)
- [A Recipe For Arbitrary Text Style Transfer with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.03910/) (2021)
- [Learning End-to-End Goal-Oriented Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07683/) (2016)
- [A Neural Network Approach to Context-Sensitive Generation of Conversational Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06714/) (2015)
- [MoEL: Mixture of Empathetic Listeners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07687/) (2019)
- [Learning to Compose Neural Networks for Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.01705/) (2016)
- [From Eliza to XiaoIce: Challenges and Opportunities with Social Chatbots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01957/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Building Better AI Agents: A Provocation on the Utilisation of Persona in LLM-based Conversational Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11977/) (2024)
- [Private Yet Social: How LLM Chatbots Support and Challenge Eating Disorder Recovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11656/) (2024)
- [Vibe Check: Understanding the Effects of LLM-Based Conversational Agents' Personality and Alignment on User Perceptions in Goal-Oriented Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09870/) (2025)
- [Agentic Persona Control and Task State Tracking for Realistic User Simulation in Interactive Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15290/) (2025)
- [Annie, Are You Okay? How Style- and Context-Based Personalization Shape AI-Assisted Decision-Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24644/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a review of personality in neural conversational agents (CAs), also called chatbots. First, we define Personality, Persona, and Profile. We explain all personality schemes which have been used in CAs, and list models under the scheme(s) which they use. Second we describe 21 datasets which have been developed in recent CA personality research. Third, we define the methods used to embody personality in a CA, and review recent models using them. Fourth, we survey some relevant reviews on CAs, personality, and related topics. Finally, we draw conclusions and identify some research challenges for this important emerging field.