Related papers: Balancing Objectives in Counseling Conversations: …
Many real-world open-domain conversation applications have specific goals to achieve during open-ended chats, such as recommendation, psychotherapy, education, etc. We study the problem of imposing conversational goals on open-domain chat…
Emotional Support Conversation aims at reducing the seeker's emotional distress through supportive response. Existing approaches have two limitations: (1) They ignore the emotion causes of the distress, which is important for fine-grained…
In this paper, a novel Generation-Evaluation framework is developed for multi-turn conversations with the objective of letting both participants know more about each other. For the sake of rational knowledge utilization and coherent…
Counseling is carried out as spoken conversation between a therapist and a client. The empathy level expressed by the therapist is considered an important index of the quality of counseling and often assessed by an observer or the client.…
The role of conversational assistants has become more prevalent in helping people increase their productivity. Document-centered assistance, for example to help an individual quickly review a document, has seen less significant progress,…
Conversations abound with uncetainties of various kinds. Treating conversation as inference and decision making under uncertainty, we propose a task independent, multimodal architecture for supporting robust continuous spoken dialog called…
Conversational agents have been studied as tools to scaffold planning and self-reflection for productivity and well-being. While prior work has demonstrated positive outcomes, we still lack a clear understanding of what drives these results…
Modelling persuasion strategies as predictors of task outcome has several real-world applications and has received considerable attention from the computational linguistics community. However, previous research has failed to account for the…
Goal-directed dialogue systems aim to proactively reach a pre-determined target through multi-turn conversations. The key to achieving this task lies in planning dialogue paths that smoothly and coherently direct conversations towards the…
Goal oriented dialogue systems have become a prominent customer-care interaction channel for most businesses. However, not all interactions are smooth, and customer intent misunderstanding is a major cause of dialogue failure. We show that…
Goal-oriented conversational agents are becoming prevalent in our daily lives. For these systems to engage users and achieve their goals, they need to exhibit appropriate social behavior as well as provide informative replies that guide…
Persuasion through conversation has been the focus of much research. Nudging is a popular strategy to influence decision-making in physical and digital settings. However, conversational agents employing "nudging" have not received…
Proactive dialogue systems, related to a wide range of real-world conversational applications, equip the conversational agent with the capability of leading the conversation direction towards achieving pre-defined targets or fulfilling…
Online conversations can sometimes take a turn for the worse, either due to systematic cultural differences, accidental misunderstandings, or mere malice. Automatically forecasting derailment in public online conversations provides an…
Communication success relies heavily on reading participants' reactions. Such feedback is especially important for mental health counselors, who must carefully consider the client's progress and adjust their approach accordingly. However,…
Proactive dialogue system is able to lead the conversation to a goal topic and has advantaged potential in bargain, persuasion and negotiation. Current corpus-based learning manner limits its practical application in real-world scenarios.…
While NLP research has made strides in conversational tasks, many approaches focus on single-turn responses with well-defined objectives or evaluation criteria. In contrast, coaching presents unique challenges with initially undefined goals…
We conducted an empirical analysis into the relation between control and discourse structure. We applied control criteria to four dialogues and identified 3 levels of discourse structure. We investigated the mechanism for changing control…
Automatically reasoning with conflicting generic clinical guidelines is a burning issue in patient-centric medical reasoning where patient-specific conditions and goals need to be taken into account. It is even more challenging in the…
Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) provide users with an interactive means to express preferences and receive real-time personalized recommendations. The success of these systems is heavily influenced by the preference elicitation…