MECoT: Markov Emotional Chain-of-Thought for Personality-Consistent Role-Playing

ACL ARR 2025 February Submission7451 Authors

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in role-playing dialogues, yet they often struggle to maintain emotionally consistent and psychologically plausible character personalities. We present MECoT (Markov Emotional Chain-of-Thought), a framework that enhances LLMs' ability to generate authentic personality-driven dialogues through stochastic emotional transitions. Inspired by dual-process theory, MECoT combines a Markov-chain-driven emotional processor for intuitive responses with an LLM-based reasoning mechanism for rational regulation, mapped onto a 12-dimensional Emotion Circumplex Model. The framework dynamically adjusts emotional transitions using personality-weighted matrices and historical context, ensuring both emotional coherence and character consistency. We introduce the Role-playing And Personality Dialogue (RAPD) dataset, featuring diverse character interactions with fine-grained emotional annotations, along with novel metrics for evaluating emotional authenticity and personality alignment. Experimental results demonstrate MECoT's effectiveness, achieving 93.3\% emotional accuracy on RAPD and substantially outperforming existing approaches. Our analysis reveals optimal emotional granularity (12-16 categories) and validates our data-driven personality optimization approach. Code and data are available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MECoT}

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Linguistic theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics

Research Area Keywords: grounded dialog, interactive storytelling, conversational modeling, evaluation and metrics, cognitive modeling

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, NLP engineering experiment, Data resources

Languages Studied: english, chinese

Submission Number: 7451