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Conversational agents promise conversational interaction but fail to deliver. Efforts often emulate functional rules from human speech, without considering key characteristics that conversation must encapsulate. Given its potential in…
Computational thinking, and by extension, computer programming, is notoriously challenging to learn. Conversational agents and generative artificial intelligence (genAI) have the potential to facilitate this learning process by offering…
The interaction of conversational systems with users poses an exciting opportunity for improving them after deployment, but little evidence has been provided of its feasibility. In most applications, users are not able to provide the…
The experience and adoption of conversational search is tied to the accuracy and completeness of users' mental models -- their internal frameworks for understanding and predicting system behaviour. Thus, understanding these models can…
Online discourse is often perceived as polarized and unproductive. While some conversational discourse parsing frameworks are available, they do not naturally lend themselves to the analysis of contentious and polarizing discussions.…
Pre-trained language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 can carry fluent, multi-turn conversations out-of-the-box, making them attractive materials for chatbot design. Further, designers can improve LLM chatbot utterances by prepending textual…
Recommendation dialogue systems aim to build social bonds with users and provide high-quality recommendations. This paper pushes forward towards a promising paradigm called target-driven recommendation dialogue systems, which is highly…
The inability to correctly resolve rumours circulating online can have harmful real-world consequences. We present a method for incorporating model and data uncertainty estimates into natural language processing models for automatic rumour…
Personal attacks in the context of social media conversations often lead to fast-paced derailment, leading to even more harmful exchanges being made. State-of-the-art systems for the detection of such conversational derailment often make…
To use generative question-and-answering (QA) systems for decision-making and in any critical application, these systems need to provide well-calibrated confidence scores that reflect the correctness of their answers. Existing calibration…
Many conversation datasets have been constructed in the recent years using crowdsourcing. However, the data collection process can be time consuming and presents many challenges to ensure data quality. Since language generation has improved…
Causal networks are widely used in many fields, including epidemiology, social science, medicine, and engineering, to model the complex relationships between variables. While it can be convenient to algorithmically infer these models…
Despite tremendous advancements in dialogue systems, stable evaluation still requires human judgments producing notoriously high-variance metrics due to their inherent subjectivity. Moreover, methods and labels in dialogue evaluation are…
The recent wave of audio foundation models (FMs) could provide new capabilities for conversational modeling. However, there have been limited efforts to evaluate these audio FMs comprehensively on their ability to have natural and…
There is substantial variability in the expectations that communication partners bring into interactions, creating the potential for misunderstandings. To directly probe these gaps and our ability to overcome them, we propose a…
Can large language models assist in data discovery? Data discovery predominantly happens via search on a data portal or the web, followed by assessment of the dataset to ensure it is fit for the intended purpose. The ability of…
Conversational practice, while crucial for all language learners, can be challenging to get enough of and very expensive. Chatbots are computer programs developed to engage in conversations with humans. They are designed as software avatars…
Evaluating the quality of a dialogue system is an understudied problem. The recent evolution of evaluation method motivated this survey, in which an explicit and comprehensive analysis of the existing methods is sought. We are first to…
The interpretation of human voices holds importance across various applications. This study ventures into predicting age, gender, and emotion from vocal cues, a field with vast applications. Voice analysis tech advancements span domains,…
The ability to understand a user's underlying needs is critical for conversational systems, especially with limited input from users in a conversation. Thus, in such a domain, Asking Clarification Questions (ACQs) to reveal users' true…