Related papers: Topic and genre in dialogue

Automatically generating debates is a challenging task that requires an understanding of arguments and how to negate or support them. In this work we define debate trees and paths for generating debates while enforcing a high level…

Evaluating open-domain dialogue systems is difficult due to the diversity of possible correct answers. Automatic metrics such as BLEU correlate weakly with human annotations, resulting in a significant bias across different models and…

Recent research has exposed disagreements over the nature and usefulness of what may (or may not) be Human-Computer Interaction's fundamental phenomenon: 'interaction'. For some, HCI's theorising about interaction has been deficient,…

Conversations with non-player characters (NPCs) in games are typically confined to dialogue between a human player and a virtual agent, where the conversation is initiated and controlled by the player. To create richer, more believable…

Robust dialogue belief tracking is a key component in maintaining good quality dialogue systems. The tasks that dialogue systems are trying to solve are becoming increasingly complex, requiring scalability to multi domain, semantically rich…

Statistical spoken dialogue systems usually rely on a single- or multi-domain dialogue model that is restricted in its capabilities of modelling complex dialogue structures, e.g., relations. In this work, we propose a novel dialogue model…

Humans continuously adapt their style and language to a variety of domains. However, a reliable definition of `domain' has eluded researchers thus far. Additionally, the notion of discrete domains stands in contrast to the multiplicity of…

Humans often employ figurative language use in communication, including during interactions with dialog systems. Thus, it is important for real-world dialog systems to be able to handle popular figurative language constructs like metaphor…

Argumentation theory is a powerful paradigm that formalizes a type of commonsense reasoning that aims to simulate the human ability to resolve a specific problem in an intelligent manner. A classical argumentation process takes into account…

Mixed initiative in open-domain dialogue requires a system to pro-actively introduce new topics. The one-turn topic transition task explores how a system connects two topics in a cooperative and coherent manner. The goal of the task is to…

We conducted an empirical analysis into the relation between control and discourse structure. We applied control criteria to four dialogues and identified 3 levels of discourse structure. We investigated the mechanism for changing control…

Encoder-decoder based neural architectures serve as the basis of state-of-the-art approaches in end-to-end open domain dialog systems. Since most of such systems are trained with a maximum likelihood~(MLE) objective they suffer from issues…

Building socialbots that can have deep, engaging open-domain conversations with humans is one of the grand challenges of artificial intelligence (AI). To this end, bots need to be able to leverage world knowledge spanning several domains…

Verbs play an important role in the understanding of natural language text. This paper studies the problem of abstracting the subject and object arguments of a verb into a set of noun concepts, known as the "argument concepts". This set of…

We present a joint modeling approach to identify salient discussion points in spoken meetings as well as to label the discourse relations between speaker turns. A variation of our model is also discussed when discourse relations are treated…

Dialogue generation has been successfully learned from scratch by neural networks, but tends to produce the same general response, e.g., "what are you talking about?", in many conversations. To reduce this homogeneity, external knowledge…

The ability to engage in mixed-initiative interaction is one of the core requirements for a conversational search system. How to achieve this is poorly understood. We propose a set of unsupervised metrics, termed ConversationShape, that…

As dialogue agents become increasingly human-like in their performance, it is imperative that we develop effective ways to describe their behaviour in high-level terms without falling into the trap of anthropomorphism. In this paper, we…

A target-guided proactive dialogue system aims to steer conversations proactively toward pre-defined targets, such as designated keywords or specific topics. During guided conversations, dynamically modeling conversational scenarios and…

Dialogue systems have attracted more and more attention. Recent advances on dialogue systems are overwhelmingly contributed by deep learning techniques, which have been employed to enhance a wide range of big data applications such as…