Related papers: Designing for Harm Reduction: Communication Repair…
The ubiquity of smartphones has led to an increase in on demand healthcare being supplied. For example, people can share their illness-related experiences with others similar to themselves, and healthcare experts can offer advice for better…
While concerns about ChatGPT-induced harms due to sycophancy and other behaviors, including gaslighting, have grown among researchers, how users themselves experience and mitigate these harms remain largely underexplored. We analyze Reddit…
In Australia, post-contact language varieties, including creoles and local varieties of international languages, emerged as a result of forced contact between Indigenous communities and English speakers. These contact varieties are widely…
High-quality feedback is essential for effective human-AI interaction. It bridges knowledge gaps, corrects digressions, and shapes system behavior; both during interaction and throughout model development. Yet despite its importance, human…
Training dialog policies for speech-based virtual assistants requires a plethora of conversational data. The data collection phase is often expensive and time consuming due to human involvement. To address this issue, a common solution is…
Amid the growing prevalence of human-AI interaction, large language models and other AI-based entities increasingly provide forms of companionship to human users. Such AI companionship -- i.e., bonded relationships between humans and AI…
Style features such as friendly, helpful, or concise are widely used in prompts to steer the behavior of Large Language Model (LLM) conversational agents, yet their unintended side effects remain poorly understood. In this work, we present…
Implicit bias may perpetuate healthcare disparities for marginalized patient populations. Such bias is expressed in communication between patients and their providers. We design an ecosystem with guidance from providers to make this bias…
Voice assistants offer a convenient and hands-free way of accessing computing in the home, but a key problem with speech as an interaction modality is how to scaffold accurate mental models of voice assistants, a task complicated by privacy…
As LM agents gain the ability to execute actions on real computer systems, we need ways to not only prevent harmful actions at scale but also effectively remediate harm when prevention fails. We formalize a solution to this neglected…
This paper outlines the challenges and opportunities of research on conversational agents with children and young people across four countries, exploring the ways AI technologies can support children's well-being across social and cultural…
The exponential increase in the use of the Internet and social media over the last two decades has changed human interaction. This has led to many positive outcomes, but at the same time it has brought risks and harms. While the volume of…
Voice assistants are increasingly prevalent, from personal devices to team environments. This study explores how voice type and contribution quality influence human-agent team performance and perceptions of anthropomorphism, animacy,…
The paper investigates the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into Conversational Agents (CAs) to encourage a shift in consumption patterns from a demand-driven to a supply-based paradigm. Specifically, the research examines the…
This paper studies the performance of large language models (LLMs), particularly regarding demographic fairness, in solving real-world healthcare tasks. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs with three prevalent learning frameworks across six…
Speech communication systems based on Voice-over-IP technology are frequently used by native as well as non-native speakers of a target language, e.g. in international phone calls or telemeetings. Frequently, such calls also occur in a…
To foster effective human-agent interactions, designers must understand how vocal cues influence the perception of agent personality and the role of user-agent alignment in shaping these perceptions. In this work, we examine whether users…
Language Representation Models (LRMs) trained with real-world data may capture and exacerbate undesired bias and cause unfair treatment of people in various demographic groups. Several techniques have been investigated for applying…
Non-native speakers (NNSs) frequently encounter speaking difficulties in multilingual communication, where existing approaches have shown promise in facilitating NNSs' comprehension and participation in real-time communication. However,…
Hate speech is a global phenomenon, but most hate speech datasets so far focus on English-language content. This hinders the development of more effective hate speech detection models in hundreds of languages spoken by billions across the…