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With the rapid development of Large Language Models, dialogue systems are shifting from information tools to emotional companions, heralding the era of Emotional Companionship Dialogue Systems (ECDs) that provide personalized emotional…

Constrained by the cost and ethical concerns of involving real seekers in AI-driven mental health, researchers develop LLM-based conversational agents (CAs) with tailored configurations, such as profiles, symptoms, and scenarios, to…

Emotional support is a crucial aspect of communication between community members and police dispatchers during incident reporting. However, there is a lack of understanding about how emotional support is delivered through text-based…

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC), the task of discerning human emotions for each utterance within a conversation, has garnered significant attention in human-computer interaction systems. Previous ERC studies focus on…

Eating disorders are complex mental health conditions that affect millions of people around the world. Effective interventions on social media platforms are crucial, yet testing strategies in situ can be risky. We present a novel LLM-driven…

Providing students with flexible and timely academic support is a challenge at most colleges and universities, leaving many students without help outside scheduled hours. Large language models (LLMs) are promising for bridging this gap, but…

Psychological support hotlines serve as critical lifelines for crisis intervention but encounter significant challenges due to rising demand and limited resources. Large language models (LLMs) offer potential support in crisis assessments,…

Evaluating persona-aligned empathy in LLM-based dialogue agents remains challenging. User states are latent, feedback is sparse and difficult to verify in situ, and seemingly supportive turns can still accumulate into trajectories that…

LLMs are increasingly deployed to simulate social interactions, yet many of the existing simulators remain ad hoc and monolithic. This lack of architectural standardization prevents reproducible research and complicates downstream…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used not only for instrumental tasks, but as always-available and non-judgmental confidants for emotional support. Yet what drives adoption and how users perceive emotional support interactions…

Young people's mental well-being is a global concern, with peer support playing a key role in daily emotional regulation. Conversational agents are increasingly viewed as promising tools for delivering accessible, personalised peer support,…

In second language learning, scenario-based conversation practice is important for language learners to achieve fluency in speaking, but students often lack sufficient opportunities to practice their conversational skills with qualified…

Conversational information access is an emerging research area. Currently, human evaluation is used for end-to-end system evaluation, which is both very time and resource intensive at scale, and thus becomes a bottleneck of progress. As an…

While language models (LMs) offer great potential for conversational recommender systems (CRSs), the paucity of public CRS data makes fine-tuning LMs for CRSs challenging. In response, LMs as user simulators qua data generators can be used…

Recently, the performance of blind speech separation (BSS) and target speech extraction (TSE) has greatly progressed. Most works, however, focus on relatively well-controlled conditions using, e.g., read speech. The performance may degrade…

Spoken dialog systems are slowly becoming and integral part of the human experience due to their various advantages over textual interfaces. Spoken language understanding (SLU) systems are fundamental building blocks of spoken dialog…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled the emergence of LLM agents, systems capable of pursuing under-specified goals and adapting after deployment. Evaluating such agents is challenging because their behavior is open ended,…

Speech emotion recognition is a vital contributor to the next generation of human-computer interaction (HCI). However, current existing small-scale databases have limited the development of related research. In this paper, we present LSSED,…

Although Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have exhibited outstanding performance in auditory understanding, their performance in affective computing scenarios, particularly in emotion recognition, reasoning, and subtle sentiment…

Spoken Dialogue Models (SDMs) have advanced rapidly, yet their ability to sustain genuinely interactive multi-turn conversations remains underexplored, as most benchmarks focus on single-turn exchanges. We introduce Multi-Bench, the first…