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Human interlocutors tend to engage in adaptive behavior known as entrainment to become more similar to each other. Isolating the effect of consistency, i.e., speakers adhering to their individual styles, is a critical part of the analysis…
Speech disfluencies play a role in perspective-taking and audience design in human-human communication (HHC), but little is known about their impact in human-machine dialogue (HMD). In an online Namer-Matcher task, sixty-one participants…
What makes a talk successful? Is it the content or the presentation? We try to estimate the contribution of the speaker's oratory skills to the talk's success, while ignoring the content of the talk. By oratory skills we refer to facial…
A sentence may express sentiments on multiple aspects. When these aspects are associated with different sentiment polarities, a model's accuracy is often adversely affected. We observe that multiple aspects in such hard sentences are mostly…
Background: Various factors determine analyst effectiveness during elicitation. While the literature suggests that elicitation technique and time are influential factors, other attributes could also play a role. Aim: Determine aspects that…
Writing persuasive arguments is a challenging task for both humans and machines. It entails incorporating high-level beliefs from various perspectives on the topic, along with deliberate reasoning and planning to construct a coherent…
This paper concerns the intersection of natural language and the physical space around us in which we live, that we observe and/or imagine things within. Many important features of language have spatial connotations, for example, many…
The past two decades have seen an upsurge of interest in the collective behaviors of complex systems composed of many agents entrained to each other and to external events. In this paper, we extend concepts of entrainment to the dynamics of…
Understanding a long document requires tracking how entities are introduced and evolve over time. We present a new type of language model, EntityNLM, that can explicitly model entities, dynamically update their representations, and…
Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and…
Long-running, high-impact events such as the Boston Marathon bombing often develop through many stages and involve a large number of entities in their unfolding. Timeline summarization of an event by key sentences eases story digestion, but…
Much research has examined models for prediction of semantic labels or instances including dense pixel-wise prediction. The problem of predicting salient objects or regions of an image has also been examined in a similar light. With that…
Performing event and entity coreference resolution across documents vastly increases the number of candidate mentions, making it intractable to do the full $n^2$ pairwise comparisons. Existing approaches simplify by considering coreference…
Personalized Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in diverse applications, where they are assigned a specific persona - such as a happy high school teacher - to guide their responses. While prior research has examined how well…
Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (e.g., time, space, color, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing…
Deep neural networks have shown recent promise in many language-related tasks such as the modeling of conversations. We extend RNN-based sequence to sequence models to capture the long range discourse across many turns of conversation. We…
Strong presentation skills are valuable and sought-after in workplace and classroom environments alike. Of the possible improvements to vocal presentations, disfluencies and stutters in particular remain one of the most common and prominent…
We consider a general class of three--state models where individuals hold one of two opposite opinions, or are neutral, and exchange opinions in generic pairwise interactions. We show that when opinions spread in a population where a…
We present a framework which constructs an event-style dis- course semantics. The discourse dynamics are encoded in continuation semantics and various rhetorical relations are embedded in the resulting interpretation of the framework. We…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for persuasion, such as in political communication and marketing, where they affect how people think, choose, and act. Yet, empirical findings on the effectiveness of LLMs in persuasion…