# Enhancing the Preference Extractor in Multi-turn Dialogues: From Annotating Disasters to Accurate Preference Extraction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01739 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01739/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Towards Scalable Multi-domain Conversational Agents: The Schema-Guided Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05855/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Recent Advances in LLM-Based Multi-turn Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18013/) (2024)
- [Evaluating ChatGPT's Information Extraction Capabilities: An Assessment of Performance, Explainability, Calibration, and Faithfulness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11633/) (2023)
- [Dialogue State Tracking with a Language Model using Schema-Driven Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07506/) (2021)
- [MEGAnno+: A Human-LLM Collaborative Annotation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18050/) (2024)
- [A Sequence-to-Sequence Approach to Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.09553/) (2020)
- [ChatGPT for Zero-shot Dialogue State Tracking: A Solution or an Opportunity?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01386/) (2023)
- [TaSL: Continual Dialog State Tracking via Task Skill Localization and Consolidation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.09857/) (2024)
- [Cross-lingual Intermediate Fine-tuning improves Dialogue State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13620/) (2021)
- [Preserving Knowledge Invariance: Rethinking Robustness Evaluation of Open Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13981/) (2023)
- [Plan, Generate and Complicate: Improving Low-resource Dialogue State Tracking via Easy-to-Difficult Zero-shot Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08860/) (2024)
- [Exploring consumers response to text-based chatbots in e-commerce: The moderating role of task complexity and chatbot disclosure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12247/) (2024)
- [A Two-dimensional Zero-shot Dialogue State Tracking Evaluation Method using GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11651/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [From Volume to Value: Preference-Aligned Memory Construction for On-Device RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.18271/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Identifying user preferences in dialogue systems is a pivotal aspect of providing satisfying services. Current research shows that using large language models (LLMs) to fine-tune a task-specific preference extractor yields excellent results in terms of accuracy and generalization. However, the primary challenge stems from the inherent difficulty in obtaining high-quality labeled multi-turn dialogue data. Accurately tracking user preference transitions across turns not only demands intensive domain expertise and contextual consistency maintenance for annotators (termed ``Annotating Disaster'') but also complicates model training due to error propagation in sequential dependency learning. Inspired by the observation that multi-turn preference extraction can be decomposed into iterative executions of one-turn extraction processes. We propose a novel dialogue data generation framework named IterChat. First, we construct a new data format that categorizes the dialogue data into attributed historical preferences and one-turn dialogues. This reduces the probability of annotation errors and improves annotation efficiency. Then, to generate a high-quality and diverse dialogue dataset, we adopt GPT4 to pre-define the preference slots in the target preference extractor task and then randomly sample the subset of the slots and their corresponding schema values to create the dialogue datasets. Experimental results indicate that fine-tuning or only few-shot prompting with the new dialogue format yields superior performance compared to the original multi-turn dialogues. Additionally, the new data format improves annotator efficiency with a win rate of 28.4% higher than the original multi-turn dialogues.