---
title: "Schema-Guided Response Generation using Multi-Frame"
description: "The authors propose SGR-MI, a schema-guided pipeline that works in three steps: It tracks the conversation as a multi-frame… 39 references."
authors: ["Jie Zeng", "Yukiko Nakano"]
year: 2026
venue: "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.2063/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/2026.findings-acl.2063"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zeng-2026-schema-guided-response-generation-multi/"
---
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# Schema-Guided Response Generation using Multi-Frame Dialogue State for Motivational Interviewing Systems

**Authors:** [Jie Zeng](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/jie-zeng/) and Yukiko Nakano · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** [Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/findings/) ([Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/findings/2026/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.2063/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.2063.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/2026.findings-acl.2063](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.findings-acl.2063) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4414449167)

**Citations:** 1 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The paper addresses how to keep LLM-based Motivational Interviewing (MI) counselors from lecturing or giving unsolicited advice. The goal is for them to help clients voice their own reasons for behavior change. The authors propose SGR-MI, a schema-guided pipeline that works in three steps:
- It tracks the conversation as a multi-frame dialogue state, where each emerging topic becomes its own structured frame.
- It decides a frame-based dialogue strategy by retrieving similar counselor strategies from a pool built on an annotated MI corpus.
- It conditions response generation on that chosen strategy.

The approach relies on prompting with little annotated data rather than large-scale training. The system was built on two different datasets and compared with the MI-FS and DIIR baselines in a crowdsourced user study. SGR-MI produced fewer MI-non-adherent behaviors and more active listening. It also asked more questions that led users to change talk grounded in their own ideas. Participants nevertheless rated MI-FS as more motivating, which the authors attribute to fluency bias. The work matters because it offers a low-resource way to reduce overreliance on directive AI advice in counseling-style dialogue.

## Key points
- **Frame schemas:** Four schema types (goal, problem, experience, plan) structure the dialogue state. Each frame carries frame_type and content. Most frames also have detail, and some have schema-specific attributes such as harm_effect and necessity_to_improve.
- **State tracking:** An LLM updates the state from the current frames plus a six-utterance history, using 10 hand-built few-shot examples. A post-processing merge step repairs dropped or duplicated frames.
- **Strategy representation:** Strategies combine an intent (Question, Affirmation, Reflection, Summarization, or Other) with focuses pointing to frames in the state. They are derived from a pseudo-strategy pool retrieved by dialogue-state similarity.
- **Limitations:** Evaluation covered single-session crowdsourced interactions with no MI-expert validation, so long-term effects remain untested.
- **Resources:** Code and data are available at github.com/IUI-Lab/schema-guided-mi.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

Also on the byline: [Seikei University](https://ror.org/03ptaj492).

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🧭 Topics (1): [🗨️ Dialogue systems](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/dialogue-systems/) · 624 works

## Cite

Cite as: Jie Zeng and Yukiko Nakano. 2026. Schema-Guided Response Generation using Multi-Frame Dialogue State for Motivational Interviewing Systems. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{zeng2026schema,
  title = {{Schema-Guided Response Generation using Multi-Frame Dialogue State for Motivational Interviewing Systems}},
  author = {Jie Zeng and Yukiko Nakano},
  booktitle = {Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.findings-acl.2063},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.findings-acl.2063}
}
```

- [← previous SCAN: Structured Capability Assessment and Navigation for LLMs](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/wang-2026-scan-structured-capability-assessment-navigation/)
- [next → schmerle at SemEval-2026 Task 4: Exploring Large Language Model Prompting Strategies for Low-Resource Narrative Similarity Detection](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/schmerle-2026-schmerle-semeval-2026-task-4/)
- [↑ back to papers of 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2026/page/17/)

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*Updated 1 November 2026*