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Human communication is based on a variety of inferences that we draw from sentences, often going beyond what is literally said. While there is wide agreement on the basic distinction between entailment, implicature, and presupposition, the…
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…
Much of human communication depends on implication, conveying meaning beyond literal words to express a wider range of thoughts, intentions, and feelings. For models to better understand and facilitate human communication, they must be…
Language models are often used as the backbone of modern dialogue systems. These models are pre-trained on large amounts of written fluent language. Repetition is typically penalised when evaluating language model generations. However, it…
Why should computers interpret language incrementally? In recent years psycholinguistic evidence for incremental interpretation has become more and more compelling, suggesting that humans perform semantic interpretation before constituent…
Both humans and machines learn the meaning of unknown words through contextual information in a sentence, but not all contexts are equally helpful for learning. We introduce an effective method for capturing the level of contextual…
When speaking or writing, people omit information that seems clear and evident, such that only part of the message is expressed in words. Especially in argumentative texts it is very common that (important) parts of the argument are implied…
We investigate neural models' ability to capture lexicosyntactic inferences: inferences triggered by the interaction of lexical and syntactic information. We take the task of event factuality prediction as a case study and build a…
Recognizing a basic difference between the semiotics of humans and machines presents a possibility to overcome the shortcomings of current speech assistive devices. For the machine, the meaning of a (human) utterance is defined by its own…
Existing datasets for audio understanding primarily focus on single-turn interactions (i.e. audio captioning, audio question answering) for describing audio in natural language, thus limiting understanding audio via interactive dialogue. To…
While previous sentiment analysis research has concentrated on the interpretation of explicitly stated opinions and attitudes, this work initiates the computational study of a type of opinion implicature (i.e., opinion-oriented inference)…
Existing conversational systems are mostly agent-centric, which assumes the user utterances would closely follow the system ontology (for NLU or dialogue state tracking). However, in real-world scenarios, it is highly desirable that the…
Engagement and motivation are crucial for second-language acquisition, yet maintaining learner interest in educational conversations remains a challenge. While prior research has explored what makes educational texts interesting, still…
Personal attributes represent structured information about a person, such as their hobbies, pets, family, likes and dislikes. We introduce the tasks of extracting and inferring personal attributes from human-human dialogue, and analyze the…
Conversational systems have become increasingly popular as a way for humans to interact with computers. To be able to provide intelligent responses, conversational systems must correctly model the structure and semantics of a conversation.…
This paper addresses the problem of dialogue reasoning with contextualized commonsense inference. We curate CICERO, a dataset of dyadic conversations with five types of utterance-level reasoning-based inferences: cause, subsequent event,…
Mastering commonsense understanding and reasoning is a pivotal skill essential for conducting engaging conversations. While there have been several attempts to create datasets that facilitate commonsense inferences in dialogue contexts,…
Coherent discourse is distinguished from a mere collection of utterances by the satisfaction of a diverse set of constraints, for example choice of expression, logical relation between denoted events, and implicit compatibility with…
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, conversational bots have became prevalent in mainstream E-commerce platforms, which can provide convenient customer service timely. To satisfy the user, the conversational bots need to…
In order to interpret the communicative intents of an utterance, it needs to be grounded in something that is outside of language; that is, grounded in world modalities. In this paper, we argue that dialogue clarification mechanisms make…