Related papers: Measuring Conversational Productivity in Child For…
Measuring the quality of public deliberation requires evaluating not only civility or argument structure, but also the informational progress of a conversation. We introduce a framework for Conversational Information Gain (CIG) that…
We introduce quantitative metrics for child language acquisition to evaluate language models. Our focus is on the formal syntactic and functional discourse properties of determiners in English, which young children acquire early and…
Evaluating meeting effectiveness is crucial for improving organizational productivity. Current approaches rely on post-hoc surveys that yield a single coarse-grained score for an entire meeting. The reliance on manual assessment is…
Interactions involving children span a wide range of important domains from learning to clinical diagnostic and therapeutic contexts. Automated analyses of such interactions are motivated by the need to seek accurate insights and offer…
To address an important gap in creating children's stories for vocabulary enrichment, we investigate the automatic evaluation of how well stories convey the semantics of target vocabulary words, a task with substantial implications for…
Conversational search (CS) has recently become a significant focus of the information retrieval (IR) research community. Multiple studies have been conducted which explore the concept of conversational search. Understanding and advancing…
We present pathways of investigation regarding conversational user interfaces (CUIs) for children in the classroom. We highlight anticipated challenges to be addressed in order to advance knowledge on CUIs for children. Further, we discuss…
This paper proposes a theoretical framework which models the information provided by retrieval systems in terms of Information Theory. The proposed framework allows to formalize: (i) system effectiveness as an information theoretic…
Various conceptual and descriptive models of conversational search have been proposed in the literature -- while useful, they do not provide insights into how interaction between the agent and user would change in response to the costs and…
In this paper, we identify challenges in children's current information retrieval process, and propose conversational robots as an opportunity to ease this process in a responsible way. Tools children currently use in this process, such as…
The world's healthcare systems and mental health agencies face both a growing demand for youth mental health services, alongside a simultaneous challenge of limited resources. Here, we focus on frontline crisis support, where Crisis…
We propose a method for training language models in an interactive setting inspired by child language acquisition. In our setting, a speaker attempts to communicate some information to a listener in a single-turn dialogue and receives a…
The increasing reliance on digital information necessitates advancements in conversational search systems, particularly in terms of information transparency. While prior research in conversational information-seeking has concentrated on…
Children efficiently acquire language not just by listening, but by interacting with others in their social environment. Conversely, large language models are typically trained with next-word prediction on massive amounts of text. Motivated…
Implicit generative models, which do not return likelihood values, such as generative adversarial networks and diffusion models, have become prevalent in recent years. While it is true that these models have shown remarkable results,…
Psychiatric intake is a sequential, high-stakes information-gathering process in which clinicians must decide what to ask, in what order, and how to interpret incomplete or ambiguous responses under limited time. Despite growing interest in…
Despite the increasing effectiveness of language models, their reasoning capabilities remain underdeveloped. In particular, causal reasoning through counterfactual question answering is lacking. This work aims to bridge this gap. We first…
Recent advances in spoken language technologies and the introduction of many customer facing products, have given rise to a wide customer reliance on smart personal assistants for many of their daily tasks. In this paper, we present a…
In the first year of life, infants' speech perception becomes attuned to the sounds of their native language. Many accounts of this early phonetic learning exist, but computational models predicting the attunement patterns observed in…
Use of speech models for automatic speech processing tasks can improve efficiency in the screening, analysis, diagnosis and treatment in medicine and psychiatry. However, the performance of pre-processing speech tasks like segmentation and…