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We analyze language change over time in a collaborative, goal-oriented instructional task, where utility-maximizing participants form conventions and increase their expertise. Prior work studied such scenarios mostly in the context of…
The recent abundance of conversational data on the Web and elsewhere calls for effective NLP systems for dialog understanding. Complete utterance-level understanding often requires context understanding, defined by nearby utterances. In…
Understanding and modelling children's cognitive processes and their behaviour in the context of their interaction with robots and social artificial intelligence systems is a fundamental prerequisite for meaningful and effective robot…
We present a syntactic dependency treebank for naturalistic child and child-directed speech in English (MacWhinney, 2000). Our annotations largely followed the guidelines of the Universal Dependencies project (UD (Zeman et al., 2022)), with…
Judging the readability of text has many important applications, for instance when performing text simplification or when sourcing reading material for language learners. In this paper, we present a 518 participant study which investigates…
Large language models (LLMs) exhibiting test-time scaling behavior, such as extended reasoning traces and self-verification, have demonstrated remarkable performance on complex, long-term reasoning tasks. However, the robustness of these…
Composing basic skills from simple tasks to accomplish composite tasks is crucial for modern intelligent systems. We investigate the in-context composition ability of language models to perform composite tasks that combine basic skills…
Language model users often issue queries that lack specification, where the context under which a query was issued -- such as the user's identity, the query's intent, and the criteria for a response to be useful -- is not explicit. For…
In-person instruction for professional development or other types of workplace training provides a social environment and immediate feedback mechanisms that typically ensure all participants are successful. Online, self-paced instruction…
Collaborative learning is an educational approach that enhances learning through shared goals and working together. Interaction and regulation are two essential factors related to the success of collaborative learning. Since the information…
Context: The usability software quality attribute aims to improve system user performance. In a previous study, we found evidence of the impact of a set of usability characteristics from the viewpoint of users in terms of efficiency,…
Modern language models (LMs) must be trained on many orders of magnitude more words of training data than human children receive before they begin to produce useful behavior. Assessing the nature and origins of this "data gap" requires…
A dialogue is successful when there is alignment between the speakers at different linguistic levels. In this work, we consider the dialogue occurring between interlocutors engaged in a collaborative learning task, where they are not only…
Humans refer to objects in their environments all the time, especially in dialogue with other people. We explore generating and comprehending natural language referring expressions for objects in images. In particular, we focus on…
Usability evaluation is an essential method to support the design of effective and intuitive user interfaces (UIs). However, it commonly relies on resource-intensive, expert-driven methods, which limit its accessibility, especially for…
The landscape of educational practices for teaching and learning languages has been predominantly centered around outcome-driven approaches. The recent accessibility of large language models has thoroughly disrupted these approaches. As we…
To address an important gap in creating children's stories for vocabulary enrichment, we investigate the automatic evaluation of how well stories convey the semantics of target vocabulary words, a task with substantial implications for…
The language we use over the course of conversation changes as we establish common ground and learn what our partner finds meaningful. Here we draw upon recent advances in natural language processing to provide a finer-grained…
Short feedback responses, such as backchannels, play an important role in spoken dialogue. So far, most of the modeling of feedback responses has focused on their timing, often neglecting how their lexical and prosodic form influence their…
Image generation models are poised to become ubiquitous in a range of applications. These models are often fine-tuned and evaluated using human quality judgments that assume a universal standard, failing to consider the subjectivity of such…