Related papers: Aligning Backchannel and Dialogue Context Represen…

Short feedback responses, such as backchannels, play an important role in spoken dialogue. So far, most of the modeling of feedback responses has focused on their timing, often neglecting how their lexical and prosodic form influence their…

Vocal feedback (e.g., `mhm', `yeah', `okay') is an important component of spoken dialogue and is crucial to ensuring common ground in conversational systems. The exact meaning of such feedback is conveyed through both lexical and prosodic…

In human conversations, short backchannel utterances such as "yeah" and "oh" play a crucial role in facilitating smooth and engaging dialogue. These backchannels signal attentiveness and understanding without interrupting the speaker,…

Pre-trained language models (PLM) have marked a huge leap in neural dialogue modeling. While PLMs are pre-trained on large-scale text corpora, they are usually fine-tuned on scarce dialogue data with specific domain knowledge and dialogue…

Backchannels and fillers are important linguistic expressions in dialogue, but often treated as 'noise' to be bypassed in modern transformer-based language models (LMs). Here, we study how they are represented in LMs using three fine-tuning…

We present our latest findings on backchannel modeling novelly motivated by the canonical use of the minimal responses Yeah and Uh-huh in English and their correspondent tokens in German, and the effect of encoding the speaker-listener…

Prompting Large Language Models (LLMs), or providing context on the expected model of operation, is an effective way to steer the outputs of such models to satisfy human desiderata after they have been trained. But in rapidly evolving…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved promising results in sentiment analysis through the in-context learning (ICL) paradigm. However, their ability to distinguish subtle sentiments still remains a challenge. Inspired by the human…

Large language models (LLMs) tend to inadequately integrate input context during text generation, relying excessively on encoded prior knowledge in model parameters, potentially resulting in generated text with factual inconsistencies or…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a cornerstone in Natural Language Processing (NLP), achieving impressive performance in text generation. Their token-level representations capture rich, human-aligned semantics. However, pooling…

Training machines to understand natural language and interact with humans is one of the major goals of artificial intelligence. Recent years have witnessed an evolution from matching networks to pre-trained language models (PrLMs). In…

Autoregressive language models (LMs) generate one token at a time, yet human reasoning operates over higher-level abstractions - sentences, propositions, and concepts. This contrast raises a central question- Can LMs likewise learn to…

Using supporting backchannel (BC) cues can make human-computer interaction more social. BCs provide a feedback from the listener to the speaker indicating to the speaker that he is still listened to. BCs can be expressed in different ways,…

Large language models (LLMs) encode parametric knowledge about world facts and have shown remarkable performance in knowledge-driven NLP tasks. However, their reliance on parametric knowledge may cause them to overlook contextual cues,…

Most language models (LMs) are trained and applied in an autoregressive left-to-right fashion, assuming that the next token only depends on the preceding ones. However, this assumption ignores the potential benefits of using the full…

Deriving multimodal representations of audio and lexical inputs is a central problem in Natural Language Understanding (NLU). In this paper, we present Contrastive Aligned Audio-Language Multirate and Multimodal Representations (CALM), an…

Large language models (LLMs) acquire knowledge across diverse domains such as science, history, and geography encountered during generative pre-training. However, due to their stochasticity, it is difficult to predict what LLMs have…

Reward-model-based fine-tuning is a central paradigm in aligning Large Language Models with human preferences. However, such approaches critically rely on the assumption that proxy reward models accurately reflect intended supervision, a…

We propose an approach for continuous prediction of turn-taking and backchanneling locations in spoken dialogue by fusing a neural acoustic model with a large language model (LLM). Experiments on the Switchboard human-human conversation…

Contrastive learning has become a popular approach in natural language processing, particularly for the learning of sentence embeddings. However, the discrete nature of natural language makes it difficult to ensure the quality of positive…