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People in conversation entrain their linguistic behaviours through spontaneous alignment mechanisms [7] - both in face-to-face and computer-mediated communication (CMC) [8]. In CMC, one of the mechanisms through which linguistic entrainment…
Humans tend to follow the Uniform Information Density (UID) principle by distributing information evenly in utterances. We study if decoding algorithms implicitly follow this UID principle, and under what conditions adherence to UID might…
The digital revolution has transformed the exchange of information between people, blurring the traditional roles of sources and recipients. In this study, we explore the influence of this bidirectional feedback using a publicly available…
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…
Using supporting backchannel (BC) cues can make human-computer interaction more social. BCs provide a feedback from the listener to the speaker indicating to the speaker that he is still listened to. BCs can be expressed in different ways,…
We reconsider the persistence of information under the dynamics of the logistic map in order to discuss communication through a nonlinear channel where the sender can set the initial state of the system with finite resolution, and the…
The average predictability (aka informativity) of a word in context has been shown to condition word duration (Seyfarth, 2014). All else being equal, words that tend to occur in more predictable environments are shorter than words that tend…
Throughout a conversation, the way participants interact with each other is in constant flux: their tones may change, they may resort to different strategies to convey their points, or they might alter their interaction patterns. An…
Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words which are combined to form phrases. We show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a…
A good conversation requires balance -- between simplicity and detail; staying on topic and changing it; asking questions and answering them. Although dialogue agents are commonly evaluated via human judgments of overall quality, the…
A conversation with a large language model (LLM) is a sequence of prompts and responses, with each response generated from the preceding conversation. AI agents build such conversations automatically: given an initial human prompt, a…
In Shannon's seminal paper, entropy of printed English, treated as a stationary stochastic process, was estimated to be roughly 1 bit per character. However, considered as a means of communication, language differs considerably from its…
Speech foundation models, such as OpenAI's Whisper, become the state of the art in speech understanding due to their strong accuracy and generalizability. Yet, their applications are mostly limited to processing pre-recorded speech, whereas…
Knowing how to end and resume conversations over time is a natural part of communication, allowing for discussions to span weeks, months, or years. The duration of gaps between conversations dictates which topics are relevant and which…
Emergent communication protocols among humans and artificial neural network agents do not yet share the same properties and show some critical mismatches in results. We describe three important phenomena with respect to the emergence and…
Conversational memory is the process by which humans encode, retain and retrieve verbal, non-verbal and contextual information from a conversation. Since human memory is selective, differing recollections of the same events can lead to…
Disentangling conversations mixed together in a single stream of messages is a difficult task, made harder by the lack of large manually annotated datasets. We created a new dataset of 77,563 messages manually annotated with reply-structure…
Biological systems can share and collectively process information to yield emergent effects, despite inherent noise in communication. While man-made systems often employ intricate structural solutions to overcome noise, the structure of…
Distributed computing models typically assume reliable communication between processors. While such assumptions often hold for engineered networks, e.g., due to underlying error correction protocols, their relevance to biological systems,…
Humans' distinctive role in the world can largely be attributed to our capacity for iterated learning, a process by which knowledge is expanded and refined over generations. A range of theories seek to explain why humans are so adept at…