Demo: An Exploration of LLM-Guided Conversation in Reminiscence Therapy

Abstract

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) succeed in human-guided conversations such as instruction following and question answering, the potential of LLM-guided conversations—where LLMs direct the discourse and steer the conversation’s objectives—remains largely untapped. In this study, we provide an exploration of the LLM-guided conversation paradigm. Specifically, we first characterize LLM-guided conversation into three fundamental properties: (i) Goal Navigation; (ii) Context Management; (iii) Empathetic Engagement, and propose GUIDELLM as a general framework for LLM-guided conversation. We then implement an autobiography interviewing environment as one of the demonstrations of GuideLLM, which is a common practice in Reminiscence Therapy. In this environment, various techniques are integrated with GUIDELLM to enhance the autonomy of LLMs, such as Verbalized Interview Protocol (VIP) and Memory Graph Extrapolation (MGE) for goal navigation, and therapy strategies for empathetic engagement. We compare GUIDELLM with baseline LLMs, such as GPT-4-turbo and GPT-4o, from the perspective of interviewing quality, conversation quality, and autobiography generation quality. Experimental results encompassing both LLM-as-a-judge evaluations and human subject experiments involving 45 participants indicate that GUIDELLM significantly outperforms baseline LLMs in the autobiography interviewing task.