# Multi-Dimensional Prompt Chaining to Improve Open-Domain Dialogue Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.01037 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01037/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [DialoGPT: Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00536/) (2019)
- [It's Not Just Size That Matters: Small Language Models Are Also Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07118/) (2020)
- [DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03957/) (2017)
- [TinyLlama: An Open-Source Small Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02385/) (2024)
- [Towards a Unified Multi-Dimensional Evaluator for Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07197/) (2022)
- [What makes a good conversation? How controllable attributes affect human judgments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08654/) (2019)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Small Language Models in the Era of Large Language Models: Techniques, Enhancements, Applications, Collaboration with LLMs, and Trustworthiness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03350/) (2024)
- [Topical-Chat: Towards Knowledge-Grounded Open-Domain Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11995/) (2023)
- [The Art of Defending: A Systematic Evaluation and Analysis of LLM Defense Strategies on Safety and Over-Defensiveness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00287/) (2023)
- [Towards Coherent and Engaging Spoken Dialog Response Generation Using Automatic Conversation Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.13015/) (2019)
- [Towards Unified Dialogue System Evaluation: A Comprehensive Analysis of Current Evaluation Protocols](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06110/) (2020)
- [Generating Empathetic Responses by Looking Ahead the User's Sentiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08487/) (2019)
- [Improving Contextual Coherence in Variational Personalized and Empathetic Dialogue Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05971/) (2022)
- [Towards Diverse, Relevant and Coherent Open-Domain Dialogue Generation via Hybrid Latent Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01145/) (2022)
- [An Empirical Bayes Framework for Open-Domain Dialogue Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10945/) (2023)
- [Advanced Conditional Variational Autoencoders (A-CVAE): Towards interpreting open-domain conversation generation via disentangling latent feature representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12696/) (2022)
- [Redefining Proactivity for Information Seeking Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15297/) (2024)
- [Modeling the One-to-Many Property in Open-Domain Dialogue with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15131/) (2025)
- [Promoting Open-domain Dialogue Generation through Learning Pattern Information between Contexts and Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02823/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Small language models (SLMs) offer significant deployment advantages but often struggle to match the dialogue quality of larger models in open-domain settings. In this paper, we propose a multi-dimensional prompt-chaining framework that integrates Naturalness, Coherence, and Engagingness dimensions to enhance human-likeness in open-domain dialogue generation. We apply the framework to two SLMs, TinyLlama and Llama-2-7B, and benchmark their performance against responses generated by substantially larger models, including Llama-2-70B and GPT-3.5 Turbo. We then employ automatic and human evaluation to assess the responses based on diversity, contextual coherence, as well as overall quality. Results show that the full framework improves response diversity by up to 29%, contextual coherence by up to 28%, and engagingness as well as naturalness by up to 29%. Notably, Llama-2-7B achieves performance comparable to substantially larger models, including Llama-2-70B and GPT-3.5 Turbo. Overall, the findings demonstrate that carefully designed prompt-based strategies provide an effective and resource-efficient pathway to improving open-domain dialogue quality in SLMs.