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Personal assistant systems, such as Apple Siri, Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Microsoft Cortana, are becoming ever more widely used. Understanding user intent such as clarification questions, potential answers and user feedback in…
Recommender systems are software applications that help users find items of interest in situations of information overload in a personalized way, using knowledge about the needs and preferences of individual users. In conversational…
In this work we explore a deep learning-based dialogue system that generates sarcastic and humorous responses from a conversation design perspective. We trained a seq2seq model on a carefully curated dataset of 3000 question-answering…
In noisy environments, speech can be hard to understand for humans. Spoken dialog systems can help to enhance the intelligibility of their output, either by modifying the speech synthesis (e.g., imitate Lombard speech) or by optimizing the…
The ability to accurately interpret implied meanings plays a crucial role in human communication and language use, and language models are also expected to possess this capability. This study demonstrates that providing language models with…
The increasingly collaborative decision-making process between humans and agents demands a comprehensive, continuous, and unobtrusive measure of trust in agents. The gold standard format for measuring trust, a Likert-style survey, suffers…
Communicating using only a limited vocabulary is a common but challenging cognitive phenomenon, requiring an ideal communicator to plan carefully to optimize for intelligibility while circumventing a constrained lexicon. In this work, we…
Users of natural language interfaces, generally powered by Large Language Models (LLMs),often must repeat their preferences each time they make a similar request. We describe an approach to LLM-based dialogue modeling in which persistent…
Questions posed by information-seeking users often contain implicit false or potentially harmful assumptions. In a high-risk domain such as maternal and infant health, a question-answering system must recognize these pragmatic constraints…
We present an interpretable neural network approach to predicting and understanding politeness in natural language requests. Our models are based on simple convolutional neural networks directly on raw text, avoiding any manual…
The full power of human language-based communication cannot be realized without negation. All human languages have some form of negation. Despite this, negation remains a challenging phenomenon for current natural language understanding…
Conversational search has seen increased recent attention in both the IR and NLP communities. It seeks to clarify and solve users' search needs through multi-turn natural language interactions. However, most existing systems are trained and…
Social norms are implicit, culturally grounded expectations that guide interpersonal communication. Unlike factual commonsense, norm reasoning is subjective, context-dependent, and varies across cultures, posing challenges for computational…
Implicit knowledge, such as common sense, is key to fluid human conversations. Current neural response generation (RG) models are trained to generate responses directly, omitting unstated implicit knowledge. In this paper, we present…
We present a setup for training, evaluating and interpreting neural language models, that uses artificial, language-like data. The data is generated using a massive probabilistic grammar (based on state-split PCFGs), that is itself derived…
In the present paper we show that distributional information is particularly important when considering concept availability under implicit language learning conditions. Based on results from different behavioural experiments we argue that…
One challenge for dialogue agents is recognizing feelings in the conversation partner and replying accordingly, a key communicative skill. While it is straightforward for humans to recognize and acknowledge others' feelings in a…
Conversational modeling is an important task in natural language understanding and machine intelligence. Although previous approaches exist, they are often restricted to specific domains (e.g., booking an airline ticket) and require…
Large language models exhibit strong multilingual capabilities despite limited exposure to non-English data. Prior studies show that English-centric large language models map multilingual content into English-aligned representations at…
Implicit discourse relation classification is one of the most challenging and important tasks in discourse parsing, due to the lack of connective as strong linguistic cues. A principle bottleneck to further improvement is the shortage of…