Related papers: Balancing Objectives in Counseling Conversations: …
Deriving value from a conversational AI system depends on the capacity of a user to translate the prior knowledge into a configuration. In most cases, discovering the set of relevant turn-level speaker intents is often one of the key steps.…
Understanding interpersonal communication requires, in part, understanding the social context and norms in which a message is said. However, current methods for identifying offensive content in such communication largely operate independent…
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in exploring dialogues with more complex goals, such as negotiation, persuasion, and emotional support, which go beyond traditional service-focused dialogue systems. Apart from the…
Conversational recommender systems have demonstrated great success. They can accurately capture a user's current detailed preference -- through a multi-round interaction cycle -- to effectively guide users to a more personalized…
A good conversation requires balance -- between simplicity and detail; staying on topic and changing it; asking questions and answering them. Although dialogue agents are commonly evaluated via human judgments of overall quality, the…
Agent assistance during human-human customer support spoken interactions requires triggering workflows based on the caller's intent (reason for call). Timeliness of prediction is essential for a good user experience. The goal is for a…
When language models answer open-ended problems, they implicitly make hidden decisions that shape their outputs, leaving users with uncontextualized answers rather than a working map of the problem; drawing on multiverse analysis from…
In human conversation, empathic dialogue requires nuanced temporal cues indicating whether the conversational partner is paying attention. This type of "active listening" is overlooked in the design of Conversational Agents (CAs), which use…
The design of dialogue flows is a critical but time-consuming task when developing task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. We propose an approach for the unsupervised discovery of flows from dialogue history, thus making the process…
Counseling typically takes the form of spoken conversation between a therapist and a client. The empathy level expressed by the therapist is considered to be an essential quality factor of counseling outcome. This paper proposes a…
Due to the lack of publicly available resources, conversation summarization has received far less attention than text summarization. As the purpose of conversations is to exchange information between at least two interlocutors, key…
As patients' access to their doctors' clinical notes becomes common, translating professional, clinical jargon to layperson-understandable language is essential to improve patient-clinician communication. Such translation yields better…
Most existing approaches for goal-oriented dialogue policy learning used reinforcement learning, which focuses on the target agent policy and simply treat the opposite agent policy as part of the environment. While in real-world scenarios,…
An intrinsic aspect of every conversation is the way talk-time is shared between multiple speakers. Conversations can be balanced, with each speaker claiming a similar amount of talk-time, or imbalanced when one talks disproportionately.…
A dialogue is successful when there is alignment between the speakers at different linguistic levels. In this work, we consider the dialogue occurring between interlocutors engaged in a collaborative learning task, where they are not only…
Conversations among online users sometimes derail, i.e., break down into personal attacks. Such derailment has a negative impact on the healthy growth of cyberspace communities. The ability to predict whether ongoing conversations are…
A discourse planner for (task-oriented) dialogue must be able to make choices about whether relevant, but optional information (for example, the "satellites" in an RST-based planner) should be communicated. We claim that effective text…
Conversation forecasting tasks a model with predicting the outcome of an unfolding conversation. For instance, it can be applied in social media moderation to predict harmful user behaviors before they occur, allowing for preventative…
Empathy is a vital factor that contributes to mutual understanding, and joint problem-solving. In recent years, a growing number of studies have recognized the benefits of empathy and started to incorporate empathy in conversational…
Speech emotions play a crucial role in human-computer interaction, shaping engagement and context-aware communication. Despite recent advances in spoken dialogue systems, a holistic system for evaluating emotional reasoning is still…