Related papers: Balancing Objectives in Counseling Conversations: …
Much research has studied foundations for correct and reliable communication-centric systems. A salient approach to correctness uses session types to enforce structured communications; a recent approach to reliability uses reversible…
Task oriented dialogue systems (TOD) complete particular tasks based on user preferences across natural language interactions. Considering the impressive performance of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing (NLP)…
Voice assistants overhear conversations and a consent management mechanism is required. Consent management can be implemented using speaker recognition. Users that do not give consent enrol their voice and all their further recordings are…
Covariate balancing is a popular technique for controlling confounding in observational studies. It finds weights for the treatment group which are close to uniform, but make the group's covariate means (approximately) equal to those of the…
Imbalanced data commonly exists in real world, espacially in sentiment-related corpus, making it difficult to train a classifier to distinguish latent sentiment in text data. We observe that humans often express transitional emotion between…
Conversation demands attention. Speakers must call words to mind, listeners must make sense of them, and both together must negotiate this flow of information, all in fractions of a second. We used large language models to study how this…
Negotiation is one of the crucial abilities in human communication, and there has been a resurgent research interest in negotiation dialogue systems recently, which goal is to empower intelligent agents with such ability that can…
In conversation-based psychotherapy, therapists use verbal techniques to help clients express thoughts and feelings, and change behavior. In particular, how well therapists convey empathy is an essential quality index of psychotherapy…
Effective feedback is essential for refining instructional practices in mathematics education, and researchers often turn to advanced natural language processing (NLP) models to analyze classroom dialogues from multiple perspectives.…
User simulation is a promising approach for automatically training and evaluating conversational information access agents, enabling the generation of synthetic dialogues and facilitating reproducible experiments at scale. However, the…
This paper presents a computational model of how conversational participants collaborate in order to make a referring action successful. The model is based on the view of language as goal-directed behavior. We propose that the content of a…
Target-oriented proactive dialogue systems aim to lead conversations from a dialogue context toward a pre-determined target, such as making recommendations on designated items or introducing new specific topics. To this end, it is critical…
Human conversations can evolve in many different ways, creating challenges for automatic understanding and summarization. Goal-oriented conversations often have meaningful sub-dialogue structure, but it can be highly domain-dependent. This…
Agents that negotiate with humans find broad applications in pedagogy and conversational AI. Most efforts in human-agent negotiations rely on restrictive menu-driven interfaces for communication. To advance the research in language-based…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning has been used as an effective means to study emergent communication between agents, yet little focus has been given to continuous acoustic communication. This would be more akin to human language…
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…
This paper studies strategic communication in the context of social learning. Product reviews are used by consumers to learn product quality, but in order to write a review, a consumer must be convinced to purchase the item first. When…
Balancing influential covariates is crucial for valid treatment comparisons in clinical studies. While covariate-adaptive randomization is commonly used to achieve balance, its performance can be inadequate when the number of baseline…
Understanding the dynamics of counseling conversations is an important task, yet it is a challenging NLP problem regardless of the recent advance of Transformer-based pre-trained language models. This paper proposes a systematic approach to…
Backchannels (e.g., `yeah', `mhm', and `right') are short, non-interruptive feedback signals whose lexical form and prosody jointly convey pragmatic meaning. While prior computational research has largely focused on predicting backchannel…