# Enhancing Target-Guided Proactive Dialogue Systems via Conversational Scenario Modeling and Intent-Keyword Bridging

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11964 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11964/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 May 2026.

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

- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.03055/) (2015)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [Towards Conversational Recommendation over Multi-Type Dialogs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03954/) (2020)
- [Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11553/) (2019)
- [DuRecDial 2.0: A Bilingual Parallel Corpus for Conversational Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08877/) (2021)
- [OTTers: One-turn Topic Transitions for Open-Domain Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13710/) (2021)
- [From Personas to Talks: Revisiting the Impact of Personas on LLM-Synthesized Emotional Support Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11451/) (2025)
- [Keyword-Guided Neural Conversational Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08383/) (2020)
- [TencentPretrain: A Scalable and Flexible Toolkit for Pre-training Models of Different Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06385/) (2022)
- [Reasoning Like a Doctor: Improving Medical Dialogue Systems via Diagnostic Reasoning Process Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13934/) (2024)
- [Dialogue Planning via Brownian Bridge Stochastic Process for Goal-directed Proactive Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05290/) (2023)
- [Interpersonal Memory Matters: A New Task for Proactive Dialogue Utilizing Conversational History](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05150/) (2025)
- [Target-constrained Bidirectional Planning for Generation of Target-oriented Proactive Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06063/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Goal-oriented Proactive Dialogue Systems via Consistency Reflection and Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13366/) (2025)
- [Pseudo-Siamese Network for Planning in Target-Oriented Proactive Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20195/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A target-guided proactive dialogue system aims to steer conversations proactively toward pre-defined targets, such as designated keywords or specific topics. During guided conversations, dynamically modeling conversational scenarios and intent keywords to guide system utterance generation is beneficial; however, existing work largely overlooks this aspect, resulting in a mismatch with the dynamics of real-world conversations. In this paper, we jointly model user profiles and domain knowledge as conversational scenarios to introduce a scenario bias that dynamically influences system utterances, and employ intent-keyword bridging to predict intent keywords for upcoming dialogue turns, providing higher level and more flexible guidance. Extensive automatic and human evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of conversational scenario modeling and intent keyword bridging, yielding substantial improvements in proactivity, fluency, and informativeness for target-guided proactive dialogue systems, thereby narrowing the gap with real world interactions.