Related papers: Semi-Automated & Collaborative Online Training Mod…
Effective communication in serious illness and palliative care is essential but often under-taught due to limited access to training resources like standardized patients. We present PAL (Palliative Assisted Learning-bot), a conversational…
Evaluating conversational AI systems that use external tools is challenging, as errors can arise from complex interactions among user, agent, and tools. While existing evaluation methods assess either user satisfaction or agents'…
Formative feedback is widely recognized as one of the most effective drivers of student learning, yet it remains difficult to implement equitably at scale. In large or low-resource courses, instructors often lack the time, staffing, and…
Effective customer support requires not only accurate problem solving but also structured and empathetic communication aligned with professional standards. However, existing dialogue datasets often lack strategic guidance, and real-world…
This paper explores two techniques to improve the performance of text-dependent speaker verification systems based on deep neural networks. Firstly, we propose a general alignment mechanism to keep the temporal structure of each phrase and…
Initiating conversations with new people at work is often intimidating because of uncertainty about their interests. People worry others may reject their attempts to initiate conversation or that others may not enjoy the conversation. We…
Many people struggling with mental health issues are unable to access adequate care due to high costs and a shortage of mental health professionals, leading to a global mental health crisis. Online mental health communities can help…
Online peer-to-peer support platforms enable conversations between millions of people who seek and provide mental health support. If successful, web-based mental health conversations could improve access to treatment and reduce the global…
The aim of the work presented in this paper is to develop and evaluate an integrated system that provides automated lecture style evaluation, allowing teachers to get instant feedback related to the goodness of their lecturing style. The…
On-the-job learning consists in continuously learning while being used in production, in an open environment, meaning that the system has to deal on its own with situations and elements never seen before. The kind of systems that seem to be…
[Context] Interviewing stakeholders is the most popular requirements elicitation technique among multiple methods. The success of an interview depends on the collaboration of the interviewee which can be fostered through the interviewer's…
Spoken Language Assessment (SLA) estimates a learner's oral proficiency from spontaneous speech. The growing population of L2 English speakers has intensified the demand for reliable SLA, a critical component of Computer Assisted Language…
Spoken conversational systems require more than accurate speech generation to have human-like conversations: to feel natural and engaging, they must produce conversational behaviour that adapts dynamically to the context. Current spoken…
Spoken language understanding (SLU) requires a model to analyze input acoustic signal to understand its linguistic content and make predictions. To boost the models' performance, various pre-training methods have been proposed to learn rich…
Predicting when to initiate speech in real-world environments remains a fundamental challenge for conversational agents. We introduce EgoSpeak, a novel framework for real-time speech initiation prediction in egocentric streaming video. By…
Recommender systems trained on offline historical user behaviors are embracing conversational techniques to online query user preference. Unlike prior conversational recommendation approaches that systemically combine conversational and…
Robot-moderated group discussions have the potential to facilitate engaging and productive interactions among human participants. Previous work on topic management in conversational agents has predominantly focused on human engagement and…
Having a group discussion with the members holding conflicting viewpoints is difficult. It is especially challenging for machine-mediated discussions in which the subtle social cues are hard to notice. We present a fully automated videochat…
Large language models (LLMs) have displayed massive improvements in reasoning and decision-making skills and can hold natural conversations with users. Many recent works seek to augment LLM-based assistants with external tools so they can…
Millions of people participate in online peer-to-peer support sessions, yet there has been little prior research on systematic psychology-based evaluations of fine-grained peer-counselor behavior in relation to client satisfaction. This…