Related papers: Predicting States of Understanding in Explanatory …
Understanding learners' cognitive and affective states underpins adaptive educational systems and effective teaching. Although research links nonverbal cues to internal states, no framework calibrates them to evidence. We present the…
This study investigates whether vision-language models (VLMs) can perform pragmatic inference, focusing on ignorance implicatures, utterances that imply the speaker's lack of precise knowledge. To test this, we systematically manipulated…
Most human interactions occur in the form of spoken conversations where the semantic meaning of a given utterance depends on the context. Each utterance in spoken conversation can be represented by many semantic and speaker attributes, and…
Prosodic cues in conversational speech aid listeners in discerning a message. We investigate whether acoustic cues in spoken dialogue can be used to identify the importance of individual words to the meaning of a conversation turn.…
This work identifies and advances some research challenges in the analysis of facial features and their temporal dynamics with epistemic mental states in dyadic conversations. Epistemic states are: Agreement, Concentration, Thoughtful,…
Learning diagnosis is a critical task that monitors students' cognitive state during educational activities, with the goal of enhancing learning outcomes. With advancements in language models (LMs), many AI-driven educational studies have…
Language understanding (LU) and dialogue policy learning are two essential components in conversational systems. Human-human dialogues are not well-controlled and often random and unpredictable due to their own goals and speaking habits.…
Humans possess a unique social cognition capability; nonverbal communication can convey rich social information among agents. In contrast, such crucial social characteristics are mostly missing in the existing scene understanding…
Both humans and machines learn the meaning of unknown words through contextual information in a sentence, but not all contexts are equally helpful for learning. We introduce an effective method for capturing the level of contextual…
Conversational multimodal understanding aims to infer the meaning or label of the current utterance from its preceding dialogue context together with textual, acoustic, and visual signals. Existing methods mainly strengthen contextual…
We present a series of two studies conducted to understand user's affective states during voice-based human-machine interactions. Emphasis is placed on the cases of communication errors or failures. In particular, we are interested in…
Research on mental state reasoning in language models (LMs) has the potential to inform theories of human social cognition--such as the theory that mental state reasoning emerges in part from language exposure--and our understanding of LMs…
Pragmatics and non-literal language understanding are essential to human communication, and present a long-standing challenge for artificial language models. We perform a fine-grained comparison of language models and humans on seven…
We address the problem of inferring a speaker's level of certainty based on prosodic information in the speech signal, which has application in speech-based dialogue systems. We show that using phrase-level prosodic features centered around…
This study examines whether sentence-level memory load in comprehension is better explained by linear proximity between syntactically related words or by the structural density of the intervening material. Building on locality-based…
Public speaking and presentation competence plays an essential role in many areas of social interaction in our educational, professional, and everyday life. Since our intention during a speech can differ from what is actually understood by…
While NLP models often seek to capture cognitive states via language, the validity of predicted states is determined by comparing them to annotations created without access the cognitive states of the authors. In behavioral sciences,…
Research in linguistics shows that non-verbal cues, such as gestures, play a crucial role in spoken discourse. For example, speakers perform hand gestures to indicate topic shifts, helping listeners identify transitions in discourse. In…
The ability to combine linguistic guidance from others with direct experience is central to human development, enabling safe and rapid learning in new environments. How do people integrate these two sources of knowledge, and how might AI…
Prosodic features such as pitch, timing, and intonation are central to spoken communication, conveying emotion, intent, and discourse structure. In text-based settings, where these cues are absent, emojis act as visual surrogates that add…