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Commonsense knowledge is essential for machines to reason about the world. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability to perform almost human-like text generation. Despite this success, they fall short as trustworthy…
Automated dialogue or conversational systems are anthropomorphised by developers and personified by users. While a degree of anthropomorphism may be inevitable due to the choice of medium, conscious and unconscious design choices can guide…
While there exist scores of natural languages, each with its unique features and idiosyncrasies, they all share a unifying theme: enabling human communication. We may thus reasonably predict that human cognition shapes how these languages…
In contrast with animal communication systems, diversity is characteristic of almost every aspect of human language. Languages variously employ tones, clicks, or manual signs to signal differences in meaning; some languages lack the…
Humans have a rich representation of the entities in their environment. Entities are described by their attributes, and entities that share attributes are often semantically related. For example, if two books have "Natural Language…
Language technologies contribute to promoting multilingualism and linguistic diversity around the world. However, only a very small number of the over 7000 languages of the world are represented in the rapidly evolving language technologies…
The ability to interact with machines using natural human language is becoming not just commonplace, but expected. The next step is not just text interfaces, but speech interfaces and not just with computers, but with all machines including…
The words of a language reflect the structure of the human mind, allowing us to transmit thoughts between individuals. However, language can represent only a subset of our rich and detailed cognitive architecture. Here, we ask what kinds of…
Language understanding research is held back by a failure to relate language to the physical world it describes and to the social interactions it facilitates. Despite the incredible effectiveness of language processing models to tackle…
The ability to cooperate through language is a defining feature of humans. As the perceptual, motory and planning capabilities of deep artificial networks increase, researchers are studying whether they also can develop a shared language to…
This paper investigates the capability of LLMs in storytelling, focusing on narrative development and plot progression. We introduce a novel computational framework to analyze narratives through three discourse-level aspects: i) story arcs,…
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…
Storytelling is an open-ended task that entails creative thinking and requires a constant flow of ideas. Natural language generation (NLG) for storytelling is especially challenging because it requires the generated text to follow an…
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…
Natural language provides a widely accessible and expressive interface for robotic agents. To understand language in complex environments, agents must reason about the full range of language inputs and their correspondence to the world.…
Research on storytelling over the last 100 years has distinguished at least two levels of narrative representation (1) story, or fabula; and (2) discourse, or sujhet. We use this distinction to create Fabula Tales, a computational framework…
Storytelling plays a central role in human socializing and entertainment. However, much of the research on automatic storytelling generation assumes that stories will be generated by an agent without any human interaction. In this paper, we…
Human language can be described as a complex network of linked words. In such a treatment, each distinct word in language is a vertex of this web, and neighboring words in sentences are connected by edges. It was recently found (Ferrer and…
Metaphors are everywhere. They appear extensively across all domains of natural language, from the most sophisticated poetry to seemingly dry academic prose. A significant body of research in the cognitive science of language argues for the…
Ubiquitous computing encapsulates the idea for technology to be interwoven into the fabric of everyday life. As computing blends into everyday physical artifacts, powerful opportunities open up for social connection. Prior connected media…