Related papers: Discovering Conversational Dependencies between Me…

Numerous online conversations are produced on a daily basis, resulting in a pressing need to conversation understanding. As a basis to structure a discussion, we identify the responding relations in the conversation discourse, which link…

Recent works show that discourse analysis benefits from modeling intra- and inter-sentential levels separately, where proper representations for text units of different granularities are desired to capture both the meaning of text units and…

Recommender systems are software applications that help users find items of interest in situations of information overload in a personalized way, using knowledge about the needs and preferences of individual users. In conversational…

We present an analysis of user conversations in on-line social media and their evolution over time. We propose a dynamic model that accurately predicts the growth dynamics and structural properties of conversation threads. The model…

Open-domain dialogue agents must be able to converse about many topics while incorporating knowledge about the user into the conversation. In this work we address the acquisition of such knowledge, for personalization in downstream Web…

In social commerce, users dialogue with each other on the topics related to the providers' products. However, the language customers use may vary from the language vendors use on their e-commerce websites and product descriptions. This…

Conversational AI increasingly supports everyday decision-making, yet most systems rely on data-centric reasoning rather than the heuristic and interactional strategies people use in natural conversation. To ground design in actual human…

While automatic response generation for building chatbot systems has drawn a lot of attention recently, there is limited understanding on when we need to consider the linguistic context of an input text in the generation process. The task…

We investigate the task of modeling open-domain, multi-turn, unstructured, multi-participant, conversational dialogue. We specifically study the effect of incorporating different elements of the conversation. Unlike previous efforts, which…

Many classical fairy tales, fiction, and screenplays leverage dialogue to advance story plots and establish characters. We present the first study to explore whether machines can understand and generate dialogue in stories, which requires…

We present a conversational recommendation system based on a Bayesian approach. A probability mass function over the items is updated after any interaction with the user, with information-theoretic criteria optimally shaping the interaction…

Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…

Virtual agents are becoming a prominent channel of interaction in customer service. Not all customer interactions are smooth, however, and some can become almost comically bad. In such instances, a human agent might need to step in and…

This paper presents a study on mutual speech variation influences in a human-computer setting. The study highlights behavioral patterns in data collected as part of a shadowing experiment, and is performed using a novel end-to-end platform…

Understanding what leads to effective conversations can aid the design of better computer-mediated communication platforms. In particular, prior observational work has sought to identify behaviors of individuals that correlate to their…

Improving user experience of a dialogue system often requires intensive developer effort to read conversation logs, run statistical analyses, and intuit the relative importance of system shortcomings. This paper presents a novel approach to…

User satisfaction is closely related to enterprises, as it not only directly reflects users' subjective evaluation of service quality or products, but also affects customer loyalty and long-term business revenue. Monitoring and…

Customers are rapidly turning to social media for customer support. While brand agents on these platforms are motivated and well-intentioned to help and engage with customers, their efforts are often ignored if their initial response to the…

Most online information sources are text-based and in Western Languages like English. However, many new and first time users of the Internet are in contexts with low English proficiency and are unable to access vital information online.…

Evaluating the quality of a dialogue interaction between two agents is a difficult task, especially in open-domain chit-chat style dialogue. There have been recent efforts to develop automatic dialogue evaluation metrics, but most of them…