Related papers: Conversational implicatures in English dialogue: A…

Discourse signals are often implicit, leaving it up to the interpreter to draw the required inferences. At the same time, discourse is embedded in a social context, meaning that interpreters apply their own assumptions and beliefs when…

The recent abundance of conversational data on the Web and elsewhere calls for effective NLP systems for dialog understanding. Complete utterance-level understanding often requires context understanding, defined by nearby utterances. In…

Speech-acts can have literal meaning as well as pragmatic meaning, but these both involve consequences typically intended by a speaker. Speech-acts can also have unintentional meaning, in which what is conveyed goes above and beyond what…

We present a preview of the Syntactic Acceptability Dataset, a resource being designed for both syntax and computational linguistics research. In its current form, the dataset comprises 1,000 English sequences from the syntactic discourse:…

Conversational implicatures are pragmatic inferences that require listeners to deduce the intended meaning conveyed by a speaker from their explicit utterances. Although such inferential reasoning is fundamental to human communication,…

Machine understanding of user utterances in conversational systems is of utmost importance for enabling engaging and meaningful conversations with users. Entity Linking (EL) is one of the means of text understanding, with proven efficacy…

Emphasis is a crucial component in human communication, which indicates the speaker's intention and implication beyond pure text in dialogue. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, their ability…

Existing dialog datasets contain a sequence of utterances and responses without any explicit background knowledge associated with them. This has resulted in the development of models which treat conversation as a sequence-to-sequence…

Commonsense inference to understand and explain human language is a fundamental research problem in natural language processing. Explaining human conversations poses a great challenge as it requires contextual understanding, planning,…

Conversational implicatures are usually described as being licensed by the disobeying or flouting of a Principle of Cooperation. However, the specification of this principle has proved computationally elusive. In this paper we suggest that…

Idioms are figurative expressions whose meanings often cannot be inferred from their individual words, making them difficult to process computationally and posing challenges for human experimental studies. This survey reviews datasets…

Conversational implicatures are usually described as being licensed by the disobeying or flouting of some principle by the speaker in cooperative dialogue. However, such work has failed to distinguish cases of the speaker flouting such a…

Human conversation relies heavily on conversational implicature, in which speakers convey meanings that are suggested rather than explicitly stated. Although recent large language models exhibit strong conversational fluency, they remain…

In this work, we systematically investigate how well current models of coherence can capture aspects of text implicated in discourse organisation. We devise two datasets of various linguistic alterations that undermine coherence and test…

Discourse relations bind smaller linguistic elements into coherent texts. However, automatically identifying discourse relations is difficult, because it requires understanding the semantics of the linked sentences. A more subtle challenge…

In this article, we are interested in the annotation of transcriptions of human-human dialogue taken from meeting records. We first propose a meeting content model where conversational acts are interpreted with respect to their…

The assumptions we make about a dialogue partner's knowledge and communicative ability (i.e. our partner models) can influence our language choices. Although similar processes may operate in human-machine dialogue, the role of design in…

Annotation of discourse relations is a known difficult task, especially for non-expert annotators. In this paper, we investigate novice annotators' uncertainty on the annotation of discourse relations on spoken conversational data. We find…

Tangled multi-party dialogue contexts lead to challenges for dialogue reading comprehension, where multiple dialogue threads flow simultaneously within a common dialogue record, increasing difficulties in understanding the dialogue history…

This paper presents a novel task using real user data obtained in human-machine conversation. The task concerns with denotation extraction from answer hints collected interactively in a dialogue. The task is motivated by the need for large…