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Human communication systems, such as language, evolve culturally; their components undergo reproduction and variation. However, a role for selection in cultural evolutionary dynamics is less clear. Often neutral evolution (also known as…
The vast amounts of on-line text now available have led to renewed interest in information extraction (IE) systems that analyze unrestricted text, producing a structured representation of selected information from the text. This paper…
When we communicate with other humans, we do not simply generate a sequence of words. Rather, we use our cognitive state (beliefs, desires, intentions) and our model of the audience's cognitive state to create utterances that affect the…
Noisy quantum channels may be used in many information carrying applications. We show that different applications may result in different channel capacities. Upper bounds on several of these capacities are proved. These bounds are based on…
People often answer yes-no questions without explicitly saying yes, no, or similar polar keywords. Figuring out the meaning of indirect answers is challenging, even for large language models. In this paper, we investigate this problem…
Throughout a conversation, participants make choices that can orient the flow of the interaction. Such choices are particularly salient in the consequential domain of crisis counseling, where a difficulty for counselors is balancing between…
We investigate the task of modeling open-domain, multi-turn, unstructured, multi-participant, conversational dialogue. We specifically study the effect of incorporating different elements of the conversation. Unlike previous efforts, which…
Classifying the information content of neural spike trains in a linguistic endeavor, an uncertainty relation emerges between the bit size of a word and its duration. This uncertainty is associated with the task of synchronizing the spike…
Perception and expression of emotion are key factors to the success of dialogue systems or conversational agents. However, this problem has not been studied in large-scale conversation generation so far. In this paper, we propose Emotional…
Backchannels and fillers are important linguistic expressions in dialogue, but often treated as 'noise' to be bypassed in modern transformer-based language models (LMs). Here, we study how they are represented in LMs using three fine-tuning…
Designing machine intelligence to converse with a human user necessarily requires an understanding of how humans participate in conversation, and thus conversation modeling is an important task in natural language processing. New…
We revisit a pragmatic inference problem in dialog: understanding indirect responses to questions. Humans can interpret 'I'm starving.' in response to 'Hungry?', even without direct cue words such as 'yes' and 'no'. In dialog systems,…
Fluent and confident speech is desirable to every speaker. But professional speech delivering requires a great deal of experience and practice. In this paper, we propose a speech stream manipulation system which can help non-professional…
People convey information extremely effectively through spoken interaction using multiple channels of information transmission: the lexical channel of what is said, and the non-lexical channel of how it is said. We propose studying human…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in complex reasoning tasks. However, current approaches employ uniform language density for both intermediate reasoning and final answers, leading to computational…
Long-form answers, consisting of multiple sentences, can provide nuanced and comprehensive answers to a broader set of questions. To better understand this complex and understudied task, we study the functional structure of long-form…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have quickly become an invaluable assistant for a variety of tasks. However, their effectiveness is constrained by their ability to tailor responses to human preferences and behaviors via personalization. Prior…
A dialogue is successful when there is alignment between the speakers at different linguistic levels. In this work, we consider the dialogue occurring between interlocutors engaged in a collaborative learning task, where they are not only…
Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these…
Existing benchmarks treat multi-turn conversation and reasoning-intensive retrieval separately, yet real-world information seeking requires both. To bridge this gap, we present a benchmark for reasoning-based conversational information…