Related papers: Conversational Markers of Constructive Discussions
Current models for opinion dynamics typically utilize a Poisson process for speaker selection, making the waiting time between events exponentially distributed. Human interaction tends to be bursty, though, having higher probabilities of…
Conversational grounding is a collaborative mechanism for establishing mutual knowledge among participants engaged in a dialogue. This experimental study analyzes information-seeking conversations to investigate the capabilities of large…
Algorithms for text-generation in dialogue can be misguided. For example, in task-oriented settings, reinforcement learning that optimizes only task-success can lead to abysmal lexical diversity. We hypothesize this is due to poor…
A rapidly increasing amount of human conversation occurs online. But divisiveness and conflict can fester in text-based interactions on social media platforms, in messaging apps, and on other digital forums. Such toxicity increases…
Discussion threads form a central part of the experience on many Web sites, including social networking sites such as Facebook and Google Plus and knowledge creation sites such as Wikipedia. To help users manage the challenge of allocating…
A good conversation requires balance -- between simplicity and detail; staying on topic and changing it; asking questions and answering them. Although dialogue agents are commonly evaluated via human judgments of overall quality, the…
Persuasion is an important and yet complex aspect of human intelligence. When undertaken through dialogue, the deployment of good arguments, and therefore counterarguments, clearly has a significant effect on the ability to be successful in…
Networked environments shape how information embedded in narratives influences individual and group beliefs and behavior. This raises key questions about how group communication around narrative media impacts belief formation and how such…
In recommendation dialogs, humans commonly disclose their preference and make recommendations in a friendly manner. However, this is a challenge when developing a sociable recommendation dialog system, due to the lack of dialog dataset…
Conversational modeling is an important task in natural language understanding and machine intelligence. Although previous approaches exist, they are often restricted to specific domains (e.g., booking an airline ticket) and require…
Information access systems such as search engines and generative AI are central to how people seek, evaluate, and interpret information. Yet most systems are designed to optimise retrieval rather than to help users develop better search…
Modelling persuasion strategies as predictors of task outcome has several real-world applications and has received considerable attention from the computational linguistics community. However, previous research has failed to account for the…
How can we enable users to heavily specify criteria for database queries in a user-friendly way? This paper describes a general framework of a conversational bot that extracts meaningful information from user's sentences, that asks…
Generating models from large data sets -- and determining which subsets of data to mine -- is becoming increasingly automated. However choosing what data to collect in the first place requires human intuition or experience, usually supplied…
Interactions among living organisms, from bacteria colonies to human societies, are inherently more complex than interactions among particles and nonliving matter. Group interactions are a particularly important and widespread class,…
Predicting the structure of a discourse is challenging because relations between discourse segments are often implicit and thus hard to distinguish computationally. I extend previous work to classify implicit discourse relations by…
Many real-world tasks require agents to coordinate their behavior to achieve shared goals. Successful collaboration requires not only adopting the same communicative conventions, but also grounding these conventions in the same…
Existing argumentation datasets have succeeded in allowing researchers to develop computational methods for analyzing the content, structure and linguistic features of argumentative text. They have been much less successful in fostering…
The field of conversational information seeking, which is rapidly gaining interest in both academia and industry, is changing how we interact with search engines through natural language interactions. Existing datasets and methods are…
In this paper we consider the task of conversational semantic parsing over general purpose knowledge graphs (KGs) with millions of entities, and thousands of relation-types. We focus on models which are capable of interactively mapping user…