Related papers: Controllable Response Generation for Assistive Use…
The rapid advancement of chat-based language models has led to remarkable progress in complex task-solving. However, their success heavily relies on human input to guide the conversation, which can be challenging and time-consuming. This…
Building dialog agents that can converse naturally with humans is a challenging yet intriguing problem of artificial intelligence. In open-domain human-computer conversation, where the conversational agent is expected to respond to human…
As language models continue to scale in size and capability, they display an array of emerging behaviors, both beneficial and concerning. This heightens the need to control model behaviors. We hope to be able to control the personality…
Group decision-making processes frequently suffer when social influence and power dynamics suppress minority viewpoints, leading to compliance and groupthink. Conversational agents can counteract these harmful dynamics by encouraging…
Responsing with image has been recognized as an important capability for an intelligent conversational agent. Yet existing works only focus on exploring the multimodal dialogue models which depend on retrieval-based methods, but neglecting…
In empathetic conversations, individuals express their empathy towards others. Previous work has mainly focused on generating empathetic responses by utilizing the speaker's emotion. Besides, external commonsense knowledge has been applied…
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…
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…
Articulation, emotion, and personality play strong roles in the orofacial movements. To improve the naturalness and expressiveness of virtual agents (VAs), it is important that we carefully model the complex interplay between these factors.…
We present the design of an online social skills development interface for teenagers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The interface is intended to enable private conversation practice anywhere, anytime using a web-browser. Users…
Recent advances in large pre-trained language models have demonstrated strong results in generating natural languages and significantly improved performances for many natural language generation (NLG) applications such as machine…
Conversational AI (CAI) systems offer opportunities to scale service provision to unprecedented levels and governments and corporations are already beginning to deploy them across services. The economic argument is similar across domains:…
Despite end-to-end neural systems making significant progress in the last decade for task-oriented as well as chit-chat based dialogue systems, most dialogue systems rely on hybrid approaches which use a combination of rule-based, retrieval…
Considerable progress has been made towards conversational models that generate coherent and fluent responses by training large language models on large dialogue datasets. These models have little or no control of the generated responses…
We present a novel natural language generation system for spoken dialogue systems capable of entraining (adapting) to users' way of speaking, providing contextually appropriate responses. The generator is based on recurrent neural networks…
We present a general approach towards controllable societal biases in natural language generation (NLG). Building upon the idea of adversarial triggers, we develop a method to induce societal biases in generated text when input prompts…
In this paper, we study an under-explored area of language and vocabulary learning: keyword mnemonics, a technique for memorizing vocabulary through memorable associations with a target word via a verbal cue. Typically, creating verbal cues…
Young people's mental well-being is a global concern, with peer support playing a key role in daily emotional regulation. Conversational agents are increasingly viewed as promising tools for delivering accessible, personalised peer support,…
Conversational Assistants (CA) are increasingly supporting human workers in knowledge management. Traditionally, CAs respond in specific ways to predefined user intents and conversation patterns. However, this rigidness does not handle the…
We present open domain response generation with meta-words. A meta-word is a structured record that describes various attributes of a response, and thus allows us to explicitly model the one-to-many relationship within open domain dialogues…