Related papers: Is spoken language all-or-nothing? Implications fo…
Phonetic ambiguity and confusibility are bugbears for any form of bottom-up or data-driven approach to language processing. The question of when an input is ``close enough'' to a target word pervades the entire problem spaces of speech…
Recent years have seen an explosion in the availability of Voice User Interfaces. However, user surveys suggest that there are issues with respect to usability, and it has been hypothesised that contemporary voice-enabled systems are…
The challenge of language grounding is to fully understand natural language by grounding language in real-world referents. While AI techniques are available, the widespread adoption and effectiveness of such technologies for human-robot…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
Recent advancements have enabled human-robot collaboration through physical assistance and verbal guidance. However, limitations persist in coordinating robots' physical motions and speech in response to real-time changes in human behavior…
Evaluation of open-domain dialogue systems is highly challenging and development of better techniques is highlighted time and again as desperately needed. Despite substantial efforts to carry out reliable live evaluation of systems in…
Real-time crowd-powered systems, such as Chorus/Evorus, VizWiz, and Apparition, have shown how incorporating humans into automated systems could supplement where the automatic solutions fall short. However, one unspoken bottleneck of…
Virtual assistants (VAs) have become ubiquitous in daily life, integrated into smartphones and smart devices, sparking interest in AI companions that enhance user experiences and foster emotional connections. However, existing companions…
Pragmatics and non-literal language understanding are essential to human communication, and present a long-standing challenge for artificial language models. We perform a fine-grained comparison of language models and humans on seven…
We describe an architecture for implementing spoken natural language dialogue interfaces to semi-autonomous systems, in which the central idea is to transform the input speech signal through successive levels of representation corresponding…
Background: Public speaking is a vital professional skill, yet it remains a source of significant anxiety for many individuals. Traditional training relies heavily on expert coaching, but recent advances in AI has led to novel types of…
Languages are shaped by the inductive biases of their users. Using a classical referential game, we investigate how artificial languages evolve when optimised for inductive biases in humans and large language models (LLMs) via Human-Human,…
Language is never spoken in a vacuum. It is expressed, comprehended, and contextualized within the holistic backdrop of the speaker's history, actions, and environment. Since humans are used to communicating efficiently with situated…
How human-like do conversational robots need to look to enable long-term human-robot conversation? One essential aspect of long-term interaction is a human's ability to adapt to the varying degrees of a conversational partner's engagement…
This research-to-practice full paper was inspired by the persistent challenge in effective communication among engineering students. Public speaking is a necessary skill for future engineers as they have to communicate technical knowledge…
Spoken language applications in natural dialogue settings place serious requirements on the choice of processing architecture. Especially under adverse phonetic and acoustic conditions parsing procedures have to be developed which do not…
When AI systems allow human-like communication, they elicit increasingly complex relational responses. Knowledge workers face a particular challenge: They approach these systems as tools while interacting with them in ways that resemble…
Chatbots are intelligent conversational computer systems designed to mimic human conversation to enable automated online guidance and support. The increased benefits of chatbots led to their wide adoption by many industries in order to…
Spoken language interaction is at the heart of interpersonal communication, and people flexibly adapt their speech to different individuals and environments. It is surprising that robots, and by extension other digital devices, are not…
The summarization of conversation, that is, discourse over discourse, elevates pragmatic considerations as a pervasive limitation of both summarization and other applications of contemporary conversational AI. Building on impressive…