Related papers: Did they answer? Subjective acts and intents in co…

Human dialogue often contains utterances having meanings entirely different from the sentences used and are clearly understood by the interlocutors. But in human-computer interactions, the machine fails to understand the implicated meaning…

Speech-acts can have literal meaning as well as pragmatic meaning, but these both involve consequences typically intended by a speaker. Speech-acts can also have unintentional meaning, in which what is conveyed goes above and beyond what…

This paper is about the flow of inference between communicative intentions, discourse structure and the domain during discourse processing. We augment a theory of discourse interpretation with a theory of distinct mental attitudes and…

Discourse involves two perspectives: a person's intention in making an utterance and others' perception of that utterance. The misalignment between these perspectives can lead to undesirable outcomes, such as misunderstandings, low…

While previous sentiment analysis research has concentrated on the interpretation of explicitly stated opinions and attitudes, this work initiates the computational study of a type of opinion implicature (i.e., opinion-oriented inference)…

In this paper, we show how game-theoretic work on conversation combined with a theory of discourse structure provides a framework for studying interpretive bias. Interpretive bias is an essential feature of learning and understanding but…

Predicting the structure of a discourse is challenging because relations between discourse segments are often implicit and thus hard to distinguish computationally. I extend previous work to classify implicit discourse relations by…

Conversational assistants are being progressively adopted by the general population. However, they are not capable of handling complicated information-seeking tasks that involve multiple turns of information exchange. Due to the limited…

Dialogue systems capable of social influence such as persuasion, negotiation, and therapy, are essential for extending the use of technology to numerous realistic scenarios. However, existing research primarily focuses on either…

Speech is the most common way humans express their feelings, and sentiment analysis is the use of tools such as natural language processing and computational algorithms to identify the polarity of these feelings. Even though this field has…

Structured sentences are important expressions in human writings and dialogues. Previous works on neural text generation fused semantic and structural information by encoding the entire sentence into a mixed hidden representation. However,…

Language is a popular resource to mine speakers' attitude bias, supposing that speakers' statements represent their bias on concepts. However, psychology studies show that people's explicit bias in statements can be different from their…

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…

During the past decade, several areas of speech and language understanding have witnessed substantial breakthroughs from the use of data-driven models. In the area of dialogue systems, the trend is less obvious, and most practical systems…

People convey information extremely effectively through spoken interaction using multiple channels of information transmission: the lexical channel of what is said, and the non-lexical channel of how it is said. We propose studying human…

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…

Enthymemes are defined as arguments where a premise or conclusion is left implicit. We tackle the task of generating the implicit premise in an enthymeme, which requires not only an understanding of the stated conclusion and premise but…

We outline how utterances in dialogs can be interpreted using a partial first order logic. We exploit the capability of this logic to talk about the truth status of formulae to define a notion of coherence between utterances and explain how…

Establishing evaluation schemes for spoken dialogue systems is important, but it can also be challenging. While subjective evaluations are commonly used in user experiments, objective evaluations are necessary for research comparison and…

The recent abundance of conversational data on the Web and elsewhere calls for effective NLP systems for dialog understanding. Complete utterance-level understanding often requires context understanding, defined by nearby utterances. In…