{"id":1014897,"date":"2024-03-14T16:47:05","date_gmt":"2024-03-14T23:47:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&#038;p=1014897"},"modified":"2025-10-09T11:51:55","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T18:51:55","slug":"interpreting-user-requests-in-the-context-of-natural-language-standing-instructions","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/publication\/interpreting-user-requests-in-the-context-of-natural-language-standing-instructions\/","title":{"rendered":"Interpreting User Requests in the Context of Natural Language Standing Instructions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Users of natural language interfaces, generally powered by Large Language Models (LLMs),often must repeat their preferences each time they make a similar request. We describe an approach to LLM-based dialogue modeling in which persistent user constraints and preferences &#8212; collectively termed standing instructions &#8212; as additional context for such interfaces. For example, when a user states&#8221;I&#8217;m hungry&#8221;, a previously expressed preference for Persian food can be automatically added to the LLM prompt, influencing the search for relevant restaurants. We develop NLSI, a language-to-program dataset consisting of over 2.4K dialogues spanning 17 domains, where each dialogue is paired with a user profile (a set of users specific standing instructions) and corresponding structured representations (API calls). A key challenge in NLSI is to identify which subset of the standing instructions is applicable to a given dialogue. NLSI contains diverse phenomena, from simple preferences to interdependent instructions such as triggering a hotel search whenever the user is booking tickets to an event. We conduct experiments on NLSI using prompting with large language models and various retrieval approaches, achieving a maximum of 44.7% exact match on API prediction. Our results demonstrate the challenges in identifying the relevant standing instructions and their interpretation into API calls.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Users of natural language interfaces, generally powered by Large Language Models (LLMs),often must repeat their preferences each time they make a similar request. We describe an approach to LLM-based dialogue modeling in which persistent user constraints and preferences &#8212; collectively termed standing instructions &#8212; as additional context for such interfaces. For example, when a user 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