Related papers: The Computational Structure of Unintentional Meani…
We investigate how verbal and nonverbal linguistic features, exhibited by speakers and listeners in dialogue, can contribute to predicting the listener's state of understanding in explanatory interactions on a moment-by-moment basis.…
An implicit expectation of asking users to rate agents, such as an AI decision-aid, is that they will use only relevant information -- ask them about an agent's benevolence, and they should consider whether or not it was kind. Behavioral…
Prosodic features such as pitch, timing, and intonation are central to spoken communication, conveying emotion, intent, and discourse structure. In text-based settings, where these cues are absent, emojis act as visual surrogates that add…
Computing devices have recently become capable of interacting with their end users via natural language. However, they can only operate within a limited "supported" domain of discourse and fail drastically when faced with an out-of-domain…
Uncertainty enters into human reasoning and inference in at least two ways. It is reasonable to suppose that there will be roles for these distinct uses of uncertainty also in automated reasoning.
Does the effectiveness of neural language models derive entirely from accurate modeling of surface word co-occurrence statistics, or do these models represent and reason about the world they describe? In BART and T5 transformer language…
In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…
Senders of messages prefer to communicate uncertainty verbally (e.g., something is likely to happen) rather than numerically (such as 75%), leaving receivers with imprecise information. While it is well established that receivers translate…
People in conversation entrain their linguistic behaviours through spontaneous alignment mechanisms [7] - both in face-to-face and computer-mediated communication (CMC) [8]. In CMC, one of the mechanisms through which linguistic entrainment…
Programming languages assume programs directly execute effects. When autonomous systems generate behavior dynamically, this assumption becomes problematic: there is no structural mediation point between deciding to act and acting. We define…
Conventional spoken language understanding systems consist of two main components: an automatic speech recognition module that converts audio to a transcript, and a natural language understanding module that transforms the resulting text…
Sarcasm is a linguistic expression often used to communicate the opposite of what is said, usually something that is very unpleasant with an intention to insult or ridicule. Inherent ambiguity in sarcastic expressions, make sarcasm…
When inferring the goals that others are trying to achieve, people intuitively understand that others might make mistakes along the way. This is crucial for activities such as teaching, offering assistance, and deciding between blame or…
This thesis presents a computational theory of unsupervised language acquisition, precisely defining procedures for learning language from ordinary spoken or written utterances, with no explicit help from a teacher. The theory is based…
By using the abstract structures investigated in the first Part of this article, we develop a semantics for an epistemic language, which expresses sentences like "Alice knows that Bob does not understand that PI is irrational". One is…
A new generation of AI models generates step-by-step reasoning text before producing an answer. This text appears to offer a human-readable window into their computation process, and is increasingly relied upon for transparency and…
We present the notion of explainability for decision-making processes in a pedagogically structured autonomous environment. Multi-agent systems that are structured pedagogically consist of pedagogical teachers and learners that operate in…
How do adults understand children's speech? Children's productions over the course of language development often bear little resemblance to typical adult pronunciations, yet caregivers nonetheless reliably recover meaning from them. Here,…
The speech-to-song illusion is a robust psychological phenomenon whereby a spoken sentence sounds increasingly more musical as it is repeated. Despite decades of research, a complete formal account of this transformation is still lacking,…
Establishing a communication system is hard because the intended meaning of a signal is unknown to its receiver when first produced, and the signaller also has no idea how that signal will be interpreted. Most theoretical accounts of the…