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In a consistent text, many words and phrases are repeatedly used in more than one sentence. When an identical phrase (a set of consecutive words) is repeated in different sentences, the constituent words of those sentences tend to be…
An important step towards enabling English language learners to improve their conversational speaking proficiency involves automated scoring of multiple aspects of interactional competence and subsequent targeted feedback. This paper builds…
Learning structural information from observational data is central to producing new knowledge outside the training corpus. This holds for mechanistic understanding in scientific discovery as well as flexible test-time compositional…
Speech is a fundamental means of communication that can be seen to provide two channels for transmitting information: the lexical channel of which words are said, and the non-lexical channel of how they are spoken. Both channels shape…
This paper presents an architecture for the generation of spoken monologues with contextually appropriate intonation. A two-tiered information structure representation is used in the high-level content planning and sentence planning stages…
Contemporary theories model language processing as integrating both top-down expectations and bottom-up inputs. One major prediction of such models is that the quality of the bottom-up inputs modulates ease of processing -- noisy inputs…
Children efficiently acquire language not just by listening, but by interacting with others in their social environment. Conversely, large language models are typically trained with next-word prediction on massive amounts of text. Motivated…
Persuasion dialogue systems reflect the machine's ability to make strategic moves beyond verbal communication, and therefore differentiate themselves from task-oriented or open-domain dialogue systems and have their own unique values.…
Many conversational domains require the system to present nuanced information to users. Such systems must follow up what they say to address clarification questions and repair misunderstandings. In this work, we explore this interactive…
Sample efficiency is a crucial property of language models with practical implications for training efficiency. In real-world text, information follows a long-tailed distribution. Yet, we expect models to learn and recall frequent and…
While large-scale neural language models, such as GPT2 and BART, have achieved impressive results on various text generation tasks, they tend to get stuck in undesirable sentence-level loops with maximization-based decoding algorithms…
Computational efficiency has remained a critical consideration in scaling high-capacity language models, with inference latency and resource consumption presenting significant constraints on real-time applications. The study has introduced…
Despite showing increasingly human-like conversational abilities, state-of-the-art dialogue models often suffer from factual incorrectness and hallucination of knowledge (Roller et al., 2020). In this work we explore the use of…
This paper uses computational experiments to explore the role of exposure in the emergence of construction grammars. While usage-based grammars are hypothesized to depend on a learner's exposure to actual language use, the mechanisms of…
Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and…
It remains debated how well any LM understands natural language or generates reliable metalinguistic judgments. Moreover, relatively little work has demonstrated that LMs can represent and respect subtle relationships between form and…
Natural language exhibits various universal properties. But why do these universals exist? One explanation is that they arise from functional pressures to achieve efficient communication, a view which attributes cross-linguistic properties…
We examine a naming game with two agents trying to establish a common vocabulary for n objects. Such efforts lead to the emergence of language that allows for an efficient communication and exhibits some degree of homonymy and synonymy.…
Tangled multi-party dialogue contexts lead to challenges for dialogue reading comprehension, where multiple dialogue threads flow simultaneously within a common dialogue record, increasing difficulties in understanding the dialogue history…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…