Related papers: From "um" to "yeah": Producing, predicting, and re…

In human conversations, short backchannel utterances such as "yeah" and "oh" play a crucial role in facilitating smooth and engaging dialogue. These backchannels signal attentiveness and understanding without interrupting the speaker,…

We present our latest findings on backchannel modeling novelly motivated by the canonical use of the minimal responses Yeah and Uh-huh in English and their correspondent tokens in German, and the effect of encoding the speaker-listener…

People spend a substantial portion of their lives engaged in conversation, and yet our scientific understanding of conversation is still in its infancy. In this report we advance an interdisciplinary science of conversation, with findings…

Backchannels (e.g., `yeah', `mhm', and `right') are short, non-interruptive feedback signals whose lexical form and prosody jointly convey pragmatic meaning. While prior computational research has largely focused on predicting backchannel…

Existing dialog datasets contain a sequence of utterances and responses without any explicit background knowledge associated with them. This has resulted in the development of models which treat conversation as a sequence-to-sequence…

The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis posits that speakers tend to distribute information evenly across linguistic units to achieve efficient communication. Of course, information rate in texts and discourses is not perfectly…

Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (e.g., time, space, color, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing…

The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis proposes that speakers aim to distribute information evenly throughout a text, balancing production effort and listener comprehension difficulty. However, language typically does not maintain…

Although neural conversation models are effective in learning how to produce fluent responses, their primary challenge lies in knowing what to say to make the conversation contentful and non-vacuous. We present a new end-to-end approach to…

Humans communicate using systems of interconnected stimuli or concepts -- from language and music to literature and science -- yet it remains unclear how, if at all, the structure of these networks supports the communication of information.…

Large language models (LLMs) often solve problems using step-by-step Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, yet these intermediate steps are frequently unfaithful or hard to interpret. Inspired by the Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis…

In this paper, we consider some long-standing problems in communication systems with access to noisy feedback. We introduce a new notion, the residual directed information, to capture the effective information flow (i.e. mutual information…

Backchanneling (e.g., "uh-huh", "hmm", a simple nod) encompasses a big part of everyday communication; it is how we negotiate the turn to speak, it signals our engagement, and shapes the flow of our conversations. For people with speech and…

As large language models (LLMs) integrate into collaborative teams, their social conformity -- the tendency to align with majority opinions -- has emerged as a key concern. In humans, conformity arises from informational influence (rational…

Remembering important information from the past and continuing to talk about it in the present are crucial in long-term conversations. However, previous literature does not deal with cases where the memorized information is outdated, which…

This paper presents our latest investigation on modeling backchannel in conversations. Motivated by a proactive backchanneling theory, we aim at developing a system which acts as a proactive listener by inserting backchannels, such as…

This paper considers the relationships among meaning generation, selection, and the dynamics of discourse from a variety of perspectives ranging from information theory and biology to sociology. Following Husserl's idea of a horizon of…

Conversation has been a primary means for the exchange of information since ancient times. Understanding patterns of information flow in conversations is a critical step in assessing and improving communication quality. In this paper, we…

Disfluencies (i.e. interruptions in the regular flow of speech), are ubiquitous to spoken discourse. Fillers ("uh", "um") are disfluencies that occur the most frequently compared to other kinds of disfluencies. Yet, to the best of our…

This paper addresses the gap in predicting turn-taking and backchannel actions in human-machine conversations using multi-modal signals (linguistic, acoustic, and visual). To overcome the limitation of existing datasets, we propose an…