Related papers: What makes an entity salient in discourse?
Automatic comment generation is a special and challenging task to verify the model ability on news content comprehension and language generation. Comments not only convey salient and interesting information in news articles, but also imply…
Over the past century, personality theory and research has successfully identified core sets of characteristics that consistently describe and explain fundamental differences in the way people think, feel and behave. Such characteristics…
Speech and voice conditions can alter the acoustic properties of speech, which could impact the performance of paralinguistic models for affect for people with atypical speech. We evaluate publicly available models for recognizing…
Prosody -- the suprasegmental component of speech, including pitch, loudness, and tempo -- carries critical aspects of meaning. However, the relationship between the information conveyed by prosody vs. by the words themselves remains poorly…
Explanations are pervasive in our lives. Mostly, they occur in dialogical form where an {\em explainer} discusses a concept or phenomenon of interest with an {\em explainee}. Leaving the explainee with a clear understanding is not…
Understanding natural language requires common sense, one aspect of which is the ability to discern the plausibility of events. While distributional models -- most recently pre-trained, Transformer language models -- have demonstrated…
Disfluencies are a natural feature of spontaneous human speech but are typically absent from the outputs of Large Language Models (LLMs). This absence can diminish the perceived naturalness of synthesized speech, which is an important…
Many socio-linguistic cues are used in conversational analysis, such as emotion, sentiment, and dialogue acts. One of the fundamental cues is politeness, which linguistically possesses properties such as social manners useful in…
Populations have often been perceived as a structuring component for language to emerge and evolve: the larger the population, the more structured the language. While this observation is widespread in the sociolinguistic literature, it has…
The formation of agents' opinions in a social system is the result of an intricate equilibrium among several driving forces. On the one hand, the social pressure exerted by peers favours the emergence of local consensus. On the other hand,…
We explore the task of improving persona consistency of dialogue agents. Recent models tackling consistency often train with additional Natural Language Inference (NLI) labels or attach trained extra modules to the generative agent for…
The notion of face refers to the public self-image of an individual that emerges both from the individual's own actions as well as from the interaction with others. Modeling face and understanding its state changes throughout a conversation…
Entities involve important concepts with concrete meanings and play important roles in numerous linguistic tasks. Entities have different forms in different linguistic tasks and researchers treat those different forms as different concepts.…
Most existing saliency models use low-level features or task descriptions when generating attention predictions. However, the link between observer characteristics and gaze patterns is rarely investigated. We present a novel saliency…
Automatically assessing classroom discussion quality is becoming increasingly feasible with the help of new NLP advancements such as large language models (LLMs). In this work, we examine how the assessment performance of 2 LLMs interacts…
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…
If language evolved by sexual selection to display superior intelligence, then we require conversational skills, to impress other people, gain high social status, and get a mate. Conversational skills include a Theory of Mind, a sense of…
High quality classroom discussion is important to student development, enhancing abilities to express claims, reason about other students' claims, and retain information for longer periods of time. Previous small-scale studies have shown…
Events and entities are closely related; entities are often actors or participants in events and events without entities are uncommon. The interpretation of events and entities is highly contextually dependent. Existing work in information…
With a growing interest in modeling inherent subjectivity in natural language, we present a linguistically-motivated process to understand and analyze the writing style of individuals from three perspectives: lexical, syntactic, and…