Related papers: Is spoken language all-or-nothing? Implications fo…
The ability to speak is an inherent part of human nature and fundamental to our existence as a social species. Unfortunately, this ability can be restricted in certain situations, such as for individuals who have lost their voice or in…
In the rapidly evolving landscape of human-robot collaboration, effective communication between humans and robots is crucial for complex task execution. Traditional request-response systems often lack naturalness and may hinder efficiency.…
When individuals engage in spoken discourse, various phenomena can be observed that differ from those that are apparent in text-based conversation. While written communication commonly uses a question mark to denote a query, in spoken…
Human language is firstly spoken and only secondarily written. Text, however, is a very convenient and efficient representation of language, and modern civilization has made it ubiquitous. Thus the field of NLP has overwhelmingly focused on…
Contemporary conversational systems often present a significant limitation: their responses lack the emotional depth and disfluent characteristic of human interactions. This absence becomes particularly noticeable when users seek more…
Humanoid robots, particularly NAO, are gaining prominence for their potential to revolutionize human-robot collaboration, especially in domestic settings like kitchens. Leveraging the advantages of NAO, this research explores non-verbal…
With the astounding progress in (generative) artificial intelligence (AI), there has been significant public discourse regarding regulation and ethics of the technology. Is it sufficient when humans discuss this with other humans? Or, given…
Inspired by recent and revolutionary developments in AI, particularly in language understanding and generation, we set about designing AI systems that are able to address complex scientific tasks that challenge human capabilities to make…
While human-AI collaboration has been a longstanding goal and topic of study for computational research, the emergence of increasingly naturalistic generative AI language models has greatly inflected the trajectory of such research. In this…
Despite the surprising power of many modern AI systems that often learn their own representations, there is significant discontent about their inscrutability and the attendant problems in their ability to interact with humans. While…
While there has been significant progress towards modelling coherence in written discourse, the work in modelling spoken discourse coherence has been quite limited. Unlike the coherence in text, coherence in spoken discourse is also…
The goal of building dialogue agents that can converse with humans naturally has been a long-standing dream of researchers since the early days of artificial intelligence. The well-known Turing Test proposed to judge the ultimate validity…
In the domain of unsupervised learning most work on speech has focused on discovering low-level constructs such as phoneme inventories or word-like units. In contrast, for written language, where there is a large body of work on…
The iPhone was introduced only a decade ago in 2007 but has fundamentally changed the way we interact with online information. Mobile devices differ radically from classic command-based and point-and-click user interfaces, now allowing for…
In task-oriented dialogue (ToD), a user holds a conversation with an artificial agent to complete a concrete task. Although this technology represents one of the central objectives of AI and has been the focus of ever more intense research…
Intelligent conversational assistants, such as Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, and Amazon's Echo, have quickly become a part of our digital life. However, these assistants have major limitations, which prevents users from conversing with…
Limited linguistic coverage for Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) means that many interact in a non-native language. Yet we know little about how IPAs currently support or hinder these users. Through native (L1) and non-native (L2)…
Despite end-to-end neural systems making significant progress in the last decade for task-oriented as well as chit-chat based dialogue systems, most dialogue systems rely on hybrid approaches which use a combination of rule-based, retrieval…
Conversational practice, while crucial for all language learners, can be challenging to get enough of and very expensive. Chatbots are computer programs developed to engage in conversations with humans. They are designed as software avatars…
Language expression is known to be dependent on attributes intrinsic to the author. To date, however, little attention has been devoted to the effect of interfaces used to articulate language on its expression. Here we study a large corpus…