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Producing natural and accurate responses like human beings is the ultimate goal of intelligent dialogue agents. So far, most of the past works concentrate on selecting or generating one pertinent and fluent response according to current…
In a human-machine dialog scenario, deciding the appropriate time for the machine to take the turn is an open research problem. In contrast, humans engaged in conversations are able to timely decide when to interrupt the speaker for…
Conversational agents have traditionally been developed for either task-oriented dialogue (TOD) or open-ended chitchat, with limited progress in unifying the two. Yet, real-world conversations naturally involve fluid transitions between…
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…
Spoken dialogue systems (SDSs) have been separately developed under two different categories, task-oriented and chit-chat. The former focuses on achieving functional goals and the latter aims at creating engaging social conversations…
Dialogue engines that incorporate different types of agents to converse with humans are popular. However, conversations are dynamic in the sense that a selected response will change the conversation on-the-fly, influencing the subsequent…
Recently, the topic-grounded dialogue (TGD) system has become increasingly popular as its powerful capability to actively guide users to accomplish specific tasks through topic-guided conversations. Most existing works utilize side…
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…
Pre-trained language models have been recently shown to benefit task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. Despite their success, existing methods often formulate this task as a cascaded generation problem which can lead to error accumulation…
Task-oriented dialogues often require agents to enact complex, multi-step procedures in order to meet user requests. While large language models have found success automating these dialogues in constrained environments, their widespread…
With the advances in deep learning, tremendous progress has been made with chit-chat dialogue systems and task-oriented dialogue systems. However, these two systems are often tackled separately in current methods. To achieve more natural…
Current Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDSs) often serve as passive listeners that respond only after receiving user speech. To achieve human-like dialogue, we propose a novel future prediction architecture that allows an SDS to anticipate future…
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…
In human dialogue, nonverbal information such as nodding and facial expressions is as crucial as verbal information, and spoken dialogue systems are also expected to express such nonverbal behaviors. We focus on nodding, which is critical…
Current speech agent interactions are typically user-initiated, limiting the interactions they can deliver. Future functionality will require agents to be proactive, sometimes interrupting users. Little is known about how these spoken…
Spoken dialogue systems promise efficient and natural access to a large variety of information sources and services from any phone. However, current spoken dialogue systems are deficient in their strategies for preventing, identifying and…
Recently, neural network based dialogue systems have become ubiquitous in our increasingly digitalized society. However, due to their inherent opaqueness, some recently raised concerns about using neural models are starting to be taken…
A proactive dialogue system has the ability to proactively lead the conversation. Different from the general chatbots which only react to the user, proactive dialogue systems can be used to achieve some goals, e.g., to recommend some items…
Previous approaches to turn-taking and response generation in conversational systems have treated it as a two-stage process: First, the end of a turn is detected (based on conversation history), then the system generates an appropriate…
In this paper I describe how miscommunication problems are dealt with in the spoken language system DIALOGOS. The dialogue module of the system exploits dialogic expectations in a twofold way: to model what future user utterance might be…