Related papers: Finding Common Ground: Annotating and Predicting C…
Cognitive computing systems require human labeled data for evaluation, and often for training. The standard practice used in gathering this data minimizes disagreement between annotators, and we have found this results in data that fails to…
Estimation of semantic similarity is crucial for a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. In the absence of a general theory of semantic information, many papers rely on human annotators as the source of ground truth for…
The relationship between the "knowledge base" and the "globalization" of communication systems is discussed from the perspective of communication theory. I argue that inter-human communication takes place at two levels. At the first level…
Knowledge-grounded dialogue systems are intended to convey information that is based on evidence provided in a given source text. We discuss the challenges of training a generative neural dialogue model for such systems that is controlled…
Cognition and language seem closely related to the human cognitive process, although they have not been studied and investigated in detail. Our brain is too complex to fully comprehend the structures and connectivity, as well as its…
Commonsense knowledge is crucial for artificial intelligence systems to understand natural language. Previous commonsense knowledge acquisition approaches typically rely on human annotations (for example, ATOMIC) or text generation models…
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…
A new generation of AI models generates step-by-step reasoning text before producing an answer. This text appears to offer a human-readable window into their computation process, and is increasingly relied upon for transparency and…
In this paper, we address the task of utterance level emotion recognition in conversations using commonsense knowledge. We propose COSMIC, a new framework that incorporates different elements of commonsense such as mental states, events,…
The differences in written text and conversational speech are substantial; previous parsers trained on treebanked text have given very poor results on spontaneous speech. For spoken language, the mismatch in style also extends to prosodic…
When language models answer open-ended problems, they implicitly make hidden decisions that shape their outputs, leaving users with uncontextualized answers rather than a working map of the problem; drawing on multiverse analysis from…
To tackle the vocabulary problem in conversational systems, previous work has applied unsupervised learning approaches on co-occurring speech and eye gaze during interaction to automatically acquire new words. Although these approaches have…
The nouns of our language refer to either concrete entities (like a table) or abstract concepts (like justice or love), and cognitive psychology has established that concreteness influences how words are processed. Accordingly,…
Prior approaches to realizing mixed-initiative human--computer referential communication have adopted information-state or collaborative problem-solving approaches. In this paper, we argue for a new approach, inspired by coherence-based…
Human language is firstly spoken and only secondarily written. Text, however, is a very convenient and efficient representation of language, and modern civilization has made it ubiquitous. Thus the field of NLP has overwhelmingly focused on…
Picture a community torn over a proposed zoning law. Some are angry, others defensive, and misunderstandings abound. On social media, they broadcast insults at one another; every nuanced perspective is reduced to a viral soundbite. Yet,…
Public debate forums provide a common platform for exchanging opinions on a topic of interest. While recent studies in natural language processing (NLP) have provided empirical evidence that the language of the debaters and their patterns…
Dialogue is at the core of human behaviour and being able to identify the topic at hand is crucial to take part in conversation. Yet, there are few accounts of the topical organisation in casual dialogue and of how people recognise the…
Identifying discourse features in student conversations is quite important for educational researchers to recognize the curricular and pedagogical variables that cause students to engage in constructing knowledge rather than merely…
Human conversations naturally evolve around related concepts and scatter to multi-hop concepts. This paper presents a new conversation generation model, ConceptFlow, which leverages commonsense knowledge graphs to explicitly model…