arXiv Computation and Language By Lex Konnelly, Elena Khasanova, Riqiang Wang, Matthias Lee, Harsh Saini, Parsa Kavehzadeh

Back in Style: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Authoring and Measuring Persona Fidelity in User Simulation

Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →

The paper proposes a sociolinguistic method for creating and evaluating user personas in simulated agents, treating personas as observable linguistic styles rather than abstract labels. By authoring personas as concrete stylistic rates, the authors apply authorship‑verification stylometry and lexicon‑based content analysis to measure fidelity, and A/B‑test this approach against a flat descriptive baseline across five customer‑service agents. Results indicate improved stylistic adherence and distinguishability for most models, though higher fidelity does not guarantee naturalness, suggesting the method is useful for pinpointing fidelity failures and advancing more diverse user simulations.

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