Related papers: Public speech recognition transcripts as a configu…

Modern conversational agents such as Alexa and Google Assistant represent significant progress in speech recognition, natural language processing, and speech synthesis. But as these agents have grown more realistic, concerns have been…

The use of natural language and voice-based interfaces gradu-ally transforms how consumers search, shop, and express their preferences. The current work explores how changes in the syntactical structure of the interaction with…

This paper proposes a novel automatic speech recognition (ASR) system that can transcribe individual speaker's speech while identifying whether they are target or non-target speakers from multi-talker overlapped speech. Target-speaker ASR…

The number of robots deployed in our daily surroundings is ever-increasing. Even in the industrial set-up, the use of coworker robots is increasing rapidly. These cohabitant robots perform various tasks as instructed by co-located human…

In this paper we describe the linguistic processor of a spoken dialogue system. The parser receives a word graph from the recognition module as its input. Its task is to find the best path through the graph. If no complete solution can be…

Automated audio captioning is a cross-modal translation task that aims to generate natural language descriptions for given audio clips. This task has received increasing attention with the release of freely available datasets in recent…

Underlying mechanisms of speech perception masked by background speakers, a common daily listening condition, are often investigated using various and lengthy psychophysical tests. The presence of a social agent, such as an interactive…

Implicit communication is crucial in human-robot collaboration (HRC), where contextual information, such as intentions, is conveyed as implicatures, forming a natural part of human interaction. However, enabling robots to appropriately use…

With the increasing prevalence of recorded human speech, spoken language understanding (SLU) is essential for its efficient processing. In order to process the speech, it is commonly transcribed using automatic speech recognition…

Indirect speech acts (ISAs) are a natural pragmatic feature of human communication, allowing requests to be conveyed implicitly while maintaining subtlety and flexibility. Although advancements in speech recognition have enabled natural…

Personal attributes represent structured information about a person, such as their hobbies, pets, family, likes and dislikes. We introduce the tasks of extracting and inferring personal attributes from human-human dialogue, and analyze the…

Beyond mere formality, small talk plays a pivotal role in social dynamics, serving as a verbal handshake for building rapport and understanding. For conversational AI and social robots, the ability to engage in small talk enhances their…

The conventional paradigm in speech translation starts with a speech recognition step to generate transcripts, followed by a translation step with the automatic transcripts as input. To address various shortcomings of this paradigm, recent…

Human collaborators coordinate effectively their actions through both verbal and non-verbal communication. We believe that the the same should hold for human-robot teams. We propose a formalism that enables a robot to decide optimally…

Speech is a natural form of communication for human beings, and computers with the ability to understand speech and speak with a human voice are expected to contribute to the development of more natural man-machine interfaces. Computers…

Imitation learning in robots, also called programing by demonstration, has made important advances in recent years, allowing humans to teach context dependant motor skills/tasks to robots. We propose to extend the usual contexts…

Spoken language applications in natural dialogue settings place serious requirements on the choice of processing architecture. Especially under adverse phonetic and acoustic conditions parsing procedures have to be developed which do not…

When a robot is asked to verbalize its plan it can do it in many ways. For example, a seemingly natural strategy is incremental, where the robot verbalizes its planned actions in plan order. However, an important aspect of this type of…

Technology companies have produced varied responses to concerns about the effects of the design of their conversational AI systems. Some have claimed that their voice assistants are in fact not gendered or human-like -- despite design…

Passive brain-computer interfaces offer a potential source of implicit feedback for alignment of large language models, but most mental state decoding has been done in controlled tasks. This paper investigates whether established EEG…