Related papers: "No, they did not": Dialogue response dynamics in …

Conversational large language models are trained to refuse to answer harmful questions. However, emergent jailbreaking techniques can still elicit unsafe outputs, presenting an ongoing challenge for model alignment. To better understand how…

The timings of spoken response offsets in human dialogue have been shown to vary based on contextual elements of the dialogue. We propose neural models that simulate the distributions of these response offsets, taking into account the…

Pre-trained LMs have shown impressive performance on downstream NLP tasks, but we have yet to establish a clear understanding of their sophistication when it comes to processing, retaining, and applying information presented in their input.…

Pretrained language models (PLMs) have produced substantial improvements in discourse-aware neural machine translation (NMT), for example, improved coherence in spoken language translation. However, the underlying reasons for their strong…

Natural languages display a trade-off among different strategies to convey syntactic structure, such as word order or inflection. This trade-off, however, has not appeared in recent simulations of iterated language learning with neural…

Selectively processing noisy utterances while effectively disregarding speech-specific elements poses no considerable challenge for humans, as they exhibit remarkable cognitive abilities to separate semantically significant content from…

Developing a dialogue agent that is capable of making autonomous decisions and communicating by natural language is one of the long-term goals of machine learning research. Traditional approaches either rely on hand-crafting a small…

Neural networks have excelled at many NLP tasks, but there remain open questions about the performance of pretrained distributed word representations and their interaction with weight initialization and other hyperparameters. We address…

In dialogues, an utterance is a chain of consecutive sentences produced by one speaker which ranges from a short sentence to a thousand-word post. When studying dialogues at the utterance level, it is not uncommon that an utterance would…

Grammatical rules in natural languages are often characterized by exceptions. How do language learners learn these exceptions to otherwise general patterns? Here, we study this question through the case study of English passivization. While…

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong conversational abilities. In this Working Paper, we study them in the context of debating in two ways: their ability to perform in a structured debate along with a dataset of arguments to use…

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…

We propose a novel preference alignment framework for improving spoken dialogue models on real-time conversations from user interactions. Current preference learning methods primarily focus on text-based language models, and are not…

Dialogue systems play an increasingly important role in various aspects of our daily life. It is evident from recent research that dialogue systems trained on human conversation data are biased. In particular, they can produce responses…

Simulation is an invaluable tool for developing and evaluating controllers for self-driving cars. Current simulation frameworks are driven by highly-specialist domain specific languages, and so a natural language interface would greatly…

Despite the recent successes of large, pretrained neural language models (LLMs), comparatively little is known about the representations of linguistic structure they learn during pretraining, which can lead to unexpected behaviors in…

We evaluate LLMs' language understanding capacities on simple inference tasks that most humans find trivial. Specifically, we target (i) grammatically-specified entailments, (ii) premises with evidential adverbs of uncertainty, and (iii)…

Despite widespread success in language understanding and generation, large language models (LLMs) exhibit unclear and often inconsistent behavior when faced with tasks that require probabilistic reasoning. In this work, we present the first…

This study analyzes changes in the attention mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) when used to understand natural conversations between humans (human-human). We analyze three use cases of LLMs: interactions over web content, code, and…

We investigate how encoder-decoder models trained on a synthetic dataset of task-oriented dialogues process disfluencies, such as hesitations and self-corrections. We find that, contrary to earlier results, disfluencies have very little…