Related papers: Conversational implicatures in English dialogue: A…

Dialogue is at the core of human behaviour and being able to identify the topic at hand is crucial to take part in conversation. Yet, there are few accounts of the topical organisation in casual dialogue and of how people recognise the…

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

Learning effective representations of sentences is one of the core missions of natural language understanding. Existing models either train on a vast amount of text, or require costly, manually curated sentence relation datasets. We show…

The possible consequences for the same context may vary depending on the situation we refer to. However, current studies in natural language processing do not focus on situated commonsense reasoning under multiple possible scenarios. This…

Figurative language is ubiquitous in English. Yet, the vast majority of NLP research focuses on literal language. Existing text representations by design rely on compositionality, while figurative language is often non-compositional. In…

Topics play an important role in the global organisation of a conversation as what is currently discussed constrains the possible contributions of the participant. Understanding the way topics are organised in interaction would provide…

One critical issue for chat systems is to stay consistent about preferences, opinions, beliefs and facts of itself, which has been shown a difficult problem. In this work, we study methods to assess and bolster utterance consistency of chat…

Improving user experience of a dialogue system often requires intensive developer effort to read conversation logs, run statistical analyses, and intuit the relative importance of system shortcomings. This paper presents a novel approach to…

The neural architectures of language models are becoming increasingly complex, especially that of Transformers, based on the attention mechanism. Although their application to numerous natural language processing tasks has proven to be very…

Empathy is a cognitive and emotional reaction to an observed situation of others. Empathy has recently attracted interest because it has numerous applications in psychology and AI, but it is unclear how different forms of empathy (e.g.,…

This document presents Annotated English, a system of diacritical symbols which turns English pronunciation into a precise and unambiguous process. The annotations are defined and located in such a way that the original English text is not…

Implicit discourse relation classification is one of the most challenging and important tasks in discourse parsing, due to the lack of connective as strong linguistic cues. A principle bottleneck to further improvement is the shortage of…

Evaluating open-domain dialogue systems is difficult due to the diversity of possible correct answers. Automatic metrics such as BLEU correlate weakly with human annotations, resulting in a significant bias across different models and…

In dialogues in which both agents are autonomous, each agent deliberates whether to accept or reject the contributions of the current speaker. A speaker cannot simply assume that a proposal or an assertion will be accepted. However, an…

Argumentation accommodates various rhetorical devices, such as questions, reported speech, and imperatives. These rhetorical tools usually assert argumentatively relevant propositions rather implicitly, so understanding their true meaning…

Open-domain dialogue agents must be able to converse about many topics while incorporating knowledge about the user into the conversation. In this work we address the acquisition of such knowledge, for personalization in downstream Web…

In this study, we explore how language captures the meaning of words, in particular meaning related to sensory experiences learned from statistical distributions across texts. We focus on the most frequent perception verbs of English…

Interpersonal language style shifting in dialogues is an interesting and almost instinctive ability of human. Understanding interpersonal relationship from language content is also a crucial step toward further understanding dialogues.…

Dependency parsing of conversational input can play an important role in language understanding for dialog systems by identifying the relationships between entities extracted from user utterances. Additionally, effective dependency parsing…

Increasing amount of research has shed light on machine perception of audio events, most of which concerns detection and classification tasks. However, human-like perception of audio scenes involves not only detecting and classifying audio…