Related papers: Speaker and Time-aware Joint Contextual Learning f…
Classifying the general intent of the user utterance in a conversation, also known as Dialogue Act (DA), e.g., open-ended question, statement of opinion, or request for an opinion, is a key step in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) for…
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…
Online psychological counseling dialogue systems are trending, offering a convenient and accessible alternative to traditional in-person therapy. However, existing psychological counseling dialogue systems mainly focus on basic empathetic…
Virtual Mental Health Assistants (VMHAs) have become a prevalent method for receiving mental health counseling in the digital healthcare space. An assistive counseling conversation commences with natural open-ended topics to familiarize the…
Spoken language understanding (SLU) is an essential component in conversational systems. Most SLU component treats each utterance independently, and then the following components aggregate the multi-turn information in the separate phases.…
The development of conversational agents to interact with patients and deliver clinical advice has attracted the interest of many researchers, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. The training of an end-to-end neural based dialog…
Recent work in Dialogue Act classification has treated the task as a sequence labeling problem using hierarchical deep neural networks. We build on this prior work by leveraging the effectiveness of a context-aware self-attention mechanism…
Existing voice AI assistants treat every detected pause as an invitation to speak. This works in dyadic dialogue, but in multi-party settings, where an AI assistant participates alongside multiple speakers, pauses are abundant and…
Accurate prediction of conversation topics can be a valuable signal for creating coherent and engaging dialog systems. In this work, we focus on context-aware topic classification methods for identifying topics in free-form human-chatbot…
Vocal entrainment is a social adaptation mechanism in human interaction, knowledge of which can offer useful insights to an individual's cognitive-behavioral characteristics. We propose a context-aware approach for measuring vocal…
Automatically and accurately identifying user intents and filling the associated slots from their spoken language are critical to the success of dialogue systems. Traditional methods require manually defining the DOMAIN-INTENT-SLOT schema…
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…
The success of interactive dialog systems is usually associated with the quality of the spoken language understanding (SLU) task, which mainly identifies the corresponding dialog acts and slot values in each turn. By treating utterances in…
Current methods for active speak er detection focus on modeling short-term audiovisual information from a single speaker. Although this strategy can be enough for addressing single-speaker scenarios, it prevents accurate detection when the…
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, conversational bots have became prevalent in mainstream E-commerce platforms, which can provide convenient customer service timely. To satisfy the user, the conversational bots need to…
Dialogue safety remains a pervasive challenge in open-domain human-machine interaction. Existing approaches propose distinctive dialogue safety taxonomies and datasets for detecting explicitly harmful responses. However, these taxonomies…
Navigating healthcare systems can be complex and overwhelming, creating barriers for patients seeking timely and appropriate medical attention. In this paper, we introduce C-PATH (Conversational Patient Assistance and Triage in Healthcare),…
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) aims to identify and restructure automatic negative thoughts pertaining to involuntary interpretations of events, yet existing counseling agents struggle to identify and address them in dialogue settings.…
The recent surge of text-based online counseling applications enables us to collect and analyze interactions between counselors and clients. A dataset of those interactions can be used to learn to automatically classify the client…
Effective communication in automated chat systems hinges on the ability to understand and respond to context. Traditional models often struggle with determining when additional context is necessary for generating appropriate responses. This…