Related papers: From "um" to "yeah": Producing, predicting, and re…
We present a document compression system that uses a hierarchical noisy-channel model of text production. Our compression system first automatically derives the syntactic structure of each sentence and the overall discourse structure of the…
From the invention of writing and the printing press, to television and social media, human history is punctuated by major innovations in communication technology, which fundamentally altered how ideas spread and reshaped our culture.…
Vocal feedback (e.g., `mhm', `yeah', `okay') is an important component of spoken dialogue and is crucial to ensuring common ground in conversational systems. The exact meaning of such feedback is conveyed through both lexical and prosodic…
Medical dialogue generation is an important yet challenging task. Most previous works rely on the attention mechanism and large-scale pretrained language models. However, these methods often fail to acquire pivotal information from the long…
With the advancement of large language models, many dialogue systems are now capable of providing reasonable and informative responses to patients' medical conditions. However, when patients consult their doctor, they may experience…
A new prior is proposed for learning representations of high-level concepts of the kind we manipulate with language. This prior can be combined with other priors in order to help disentangling abstract factors from each other. It is…
We try to establish a unified information theoretic approach to learning and to explore some of its applications. First, we define {\em predictive information} as the mutual information between the past and the future of a time series,…
Dense video captioning (DVC) aims to generate multi-sentence descriptions to elucidate the multiple events in the video, which is challenging and demands visual consistency, discoursal coherence, and linguistic diversity. Existing methods…
In the realm of human-computer interaction, fostering a natural dialogue between humans and machines is paramount. A key, often overlooked, component of this dialogue is the use of interjections such as "mmm" and "hmm". Despite their…
Humans organize knowledge into compact conceptual categories that balance compression with semantic richness. Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive linguistic abilities, but whether they navigate this same compression-meaning…
Planning is useful. It lets people take actions that have desirable long-term consequences. But, planning is hard. It requires thinking about consequences, which consumes limited computational and cognitive resources. Thus, people should…
Self-organization is the generation of order out of local interactions in non-equilibrium [1]. It is deeply connected to all fields of science from physics, chemistry to biology where functional living structures self-assemble[2] and…
We derive three fundamental decompositions on relevant information quantities in feedback systems. The feedback systems considered in this paper are only restricted to be causal in time domain and the channels are allowed to be subject to…
We introduce a comprehensive benchmark for conversational memory evaluation containing 75,336 question-answer pairs across diverse categories including user facts, assistant recall, abstention, preferences, temporal changes, and implicit…
During a conversation, there can come certain moments where its outcome hangs in the balance. In these pivotal moments, how one responds can put the conversation on substantially different trajectories leading to significantly different…
In both natural and engineered systems, communication often occurs dynamically over networks ranging from highly structured grids to largely disordered graphs. To use, or comprehend the use of, networks as efficient communication media…
There has been considerable progress made towards conversational models that generate coherent and fluent responses; however, this often involves training large language models on large dialogue datasets, such as Reddit. These large…
Topics play an important role in the global organisation of a conversation as what is currently discussed constrains the possible contributions of the participant. Understanding the way topics are organised in interaction would provide…
This work reviews the human auditory system, elucidating some of the specialized mechanisms and non-linear pathways along the chain of events between physical sound and its perception. Customary relationships between frequency, time, and…
Understanding how humans process natural language has long been a vital research direction. The field of natural language processing (NLP) has recently experienced a surge in the development of powerful language models. These models have…