Related papers: Balancing Objectives in Counseling Conversations: …
During a conversation, there can come certain moments where its outcome hangs in the balance. In these pivotal moments, how one responds can put the conversation on substantially different trajectories leading to significantly different…
Mental-health therapy involves a complex conversation flow in which patients and therapists continuously negotiate what should be talked about next. For example, therapists might try to shift the conversation's direction to keep the…
Understanding what leads to effective conversations can aid the design of better computer-mediated communication platforms. In particular, prior observational work has sought to identify behaviors of individuals that correlate to their…
Mental illness is one of the most pressing public health issues of our time. While counseling and psychotherapy can be effective treatments, our knowledge about how to conduct successful counseling conversations has been limited due to lack…
Mental health counseling is an enterprise with profound societal importance where conversations play a primary role. In order to acquire the conversational skills needed to face a challenging range of situations, mental health counselors…
Recent advances in large-scale language modeling and generation have enabled the creation of dialogue agents that exhibit human-like responses in a wide range of conversational scenarios spanning a diverse set of tasks, from general…
Heuristics and cognitive biases are an integral part of human decision-making. Automatically detecting a particular cognitive bias could enable intelligent tools to provide better decision-support. Detecting the presence of a cognitive bias…
We study the problem of imposing conversational goals/keywords on open-domain conversational agents, where the agent is required to lead the conversation to a target keyword smoothly and fast. Solving this problem enables the application of…
Goal-oriented conversational systems require making sequential decisions under uncertainty about the user's intent, where the algorithm must balance information acquisition and target commitment over multiple turns. Existing approaches…
Turn-level user satisfaction is one of the most important performance metrics for conversational agents. It can be used to monitor the agent's performance and provide insights about defective user experiences. Moreover, a powerful…
The majority of voice-based conversational agents still rely on pause-and-respond turn-taking, leaving interactions sounding stiff and robotic. We present RESPOND (Responsive Engagement Strategy for Predictive Orchestration and Dialogue), a…
We often rely on our intuition to anticipate the direction of a conversation. Endowing automated systems with similar foresight can enable them to assist human-human interactions. Recent work on developing models with this predictive…
Recommendation dialogue systems aim to build social bonds with users and provide high-quality recommendations. This paper pushes forward towards a promising paradigm called target-driven recommendation dialogue systems, which is highly…
Recent debates over adults' theory of mind use have been fueled by surprising failures of perspective-taking in communication, suggesting that perspective-taking can be relatively effortful. How, then, should speakers and listeners allocate…
Forecasting conversation derailment can be useful in real-world settings such as online content moderation, conflict resolution, and business negotiations. However, despite language models' success at identifying offensive speech present in…
Humans quite frequently interact with conversational agents. The rapid advancement in generative language modeling through neural networks has helped advance the creation of intelligent conversational agents. Researchers typically evaluate…
Throughout a conversation, the way participants interact with each other is in constant flux: their tones may change, they may resort to different strategies to convey their points, or they might alter their interaction patterns. An…
While we do not always use words, communicating what we want to an AI is a conversation -- with ourselves as well as with it, a recurring loop with optional steps depending on the complexity of the situation and our request. Any given…
Unlike well-structured text, such as news reports and encyclopedia articles, dialogue content often comes from two or more interlocutors, exchanging information with each other. In such a scenario, the topic of a conversation can vary upon…
A target-guided proactive dialogue system aims to steer conversations proactively toward pre-defined targets, such as designated keywords or specific topics. During guided conversations, dynamically modeling conversational scenarios and…