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The development of conversational agents (CAs) has shown strong potential in supporting mental health through dialogue. While many studies focus on CAs for individual psychological care, research on agents designed for couples facing…
Rigorous and interactive class discussions that support students to engage in high-level thinking and reasoning are essential to learning and are a central component of most teaching interventions. However, formally assessing discussion…
Large language models (LLMs) are poised to revolutionize the domain of online fashion retail, enhancing customer experience and discovery of fashion online. LLM-powered conversational agents introduce a new way of discovery by directly…
We propose a novel preference alignment framework for improving spoken dialogue models on real-time conversations from user interactions. Current preference learning methods primarily focus on text-based language models, and are not…
We introduce an approach to evaluate language model (LM) agency using negotiation games. This approach better reflects real-world use cases and addresses some of the shortcomings of alternative LM benchmarks. Negotiation games enable us to…
Assessing instruction quality is a fundamental component of any improvement efforts in the education system. However, traditional manual assessments are expensive, subjective, and heavily dependent on observers' expertise and idiosyncratic…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing but exhibit limitations, particularly in autonomously addressing novel challenges such as reasoning and problem-solving. Traditional techniques like…
We study what actually works and what doesn't for training large language models as agents via multi-turn reinforcement learning. Despite rapid progress, existing frameworks and definitions are fragmented, and there is no systematic…
Natural Language Generation (NLG) for task-oriented dialogue systems focuses on communicating specific content accurately, fluently, and coherently. While these attributes are crucial for a successful dialogue, it is also desirable to…
The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in interactive systems necessitates a deep alignment with the nuanced and dynamic preferences of individual users. Current alignment techniques predominantly address universal human values or…
Young people's mental well-being is a global concern, with peer support playing a key role in daily emotional regulation. Conversational agents are increasingly viewed as promising tools for delivering accessible, personalised peer support,…
Growing literature explores toxicity and polarization in discourse, with comparatively less work on characterizing what makes dialogue prosocial and constructive. We explore conversational discourse and investigate a method for…
Amid the rapid rise of agentic dialogue models, realistic user-simulator studies are essential for tuning effective conversation strategies. This work investigates a sales-oriented agent that adapts its dialogue based on user profiles…
Transcribing and understanding multi-speaker conversations requires speech recognition, speaker attribution, and timestamp localization. While speech LLMs excel at single-speaker tasks, multi-speaker scenarios remain challenging due to…
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) demonstrate their potential as educational tutors. However, different tutoring strategies benefit different student personalities, and mismatches can be counterproductive to student outcomes.…
Recent advancements in LLM agents are gradually shifting from reactive, text-based paradigms toward proactive, multimodal interaction. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on reactive responses, overlooking the complexities of…
Research in the social sciences and psychology has shown that the persuasiveness of an argument depends not only the language employed, but also on attributes of the source/communicator, the audience, and the appropriateness and strength of…
Many businesses and consumers are extending the capabilities of voice-based services such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple Siri to create custom voice experiences (also known as skills). As the number of these…
Formality style transfer is the task of converting informal sentences to grammatically-correct formal sentences, which can be used to improve performance of many downstream NLP tasks. In this work, we propose a semi-supervised formality…
Self-report questionnaires have long been used to assess LLM personality traits, yet they fail to capture behavioral nuances due to biases and meta-knowledge contamination. This paper proposes a novel multi-observer framework for…