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Goal-oriented conversational systems require making sequential decisions under uncertainty about the user's intent, where the algorithm must balance information acquisition and target commitment over multiple turns. Existing approaches…
Understanding how information can efficiently spread in distributed systems under noisy communications is a fundamental question in both biological research and artificial system design. When agents are able to control whom they interact…
Sequence-to-sequence models have been applied to the conversation response generation problem where the source sequence is the conversation history and the target sequence is the response. Unlike translation, conversation responding is…
Speech is a fundamental means of communication that can be seen to provide two channels for transmitting information: the lexical channel of which words are said, and the non-lexical channel of how they are spoken. Both channels shape…
Humans quite frequently interact with conversational agents. The rapid advancement in generative language modeling through neural networks has helped advance the creation of intelligent conversational agents. Researchers typically evaluate…
Explanations are central to everyday life, and are a topic of growing interest in the AI community. To investigate the process of providing natural language explanations, we leverage the dynamics of the /r/ChangeMyView subreddit to build a…
The intelligibility of speech relies on the ability of interlocutors to dynamically align their expectations about the rates at which informative changes in signals occur. Exactly how this is achieved remains an open question. We propose…
The language we use over the course of conversation changes as we establish common ground and learn what our partner finds meaningful. Here we draw upon recent advances in natural language processing to provide a finer-grained…
Estimating the information transmission capability of a quantum channel remains one of the fundamental problems in quantum information processing. In contrast to classical channels, the information-carrying capability of quantum channels is…
From the eardrum to the auditory cortex, where acoustic stimuli are decoded, there are several stages of auditory processing and transmission where information may potentially get lost. In this paper, we aim at quantifying the information…
Short feedback responses, such as backchannels, play an important role in spoken dialogue. So far, most of the modeling of feedback responses has focused on their timing, often neglecting how their lexical and prosodic form influence their…
Auditory attention and selective phase-locking are central to human speech understanding in complex acoustic scenes and cocktail party settings, yet these capabilities in multilingual subjects remain poorly understood. While machine…
In open-domain conversational systems, it is important but challenging to leverage background knowledge. We can use the incorporation of knowledge to make the generation of dialogue controllable, and can generate more diverse sentences that…
Conversational tones -- the manners and attitudes in which speakers communicate -- are essential to effective communication. Amidst the increasing popularization of Large Language Models (LLMs) over recent years, it becomes necessary to…
While we do not always use words, communicating what we want to an AI is a conversation -- with ourselves as well as with it, a recurring loop with optional steps depending on the complexity of the situation and our request. Any given…
How can we better understand the mechanisms behind multi-turn information seeking dialogues? How can we use these insights to design a dialogue system that does not require explicit query formulation upfront as in question answering? To…
Communication is defined as "Who says what to whom with what effect". A message from a communicator generates downstream receiver effects, also known as behavior. Receiver behavior, being a downstream effect of the message, carries rich…
Group discussions are essential for organizing every aspect of modern life, from faculty meetings to senate debates, from grant review panels to papal conclaves. While costly in terms of time and organization effort, group discussions are…
Persuasion through conversation has been the focus of much research. Nudging is a popular strategy to influence decision-making in physical and digital settings. However, conversational agents employing "nudging" have not received…
Contextual predictability shapes how we choose and encode words in production. The effects of a word's predictability given preceding or past context are generally well-understood in both production and comprehension, but studies of…