2025/09/05 by Inbal Bolshinsky, Bolshinsky, Inbal, Shani Kupiec +7
Computer Science · #AI in Service Interactions #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Speech and dialogue systems #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.05006
openalex publication_date 2025/09/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.