Related papers: Intentions and Information in Discourse
This paper presents an unsupervised framework for jointly modeling topic content and discourse behavior in microblog conversations. Concretely, we propose a neural model to discover word clusters indicating what a conversation concerns…
The recent abundance of conversational data on the Web and elsewhere calls for effective NLP systems for dialog understanding. Complete utterance-level understanding often requires context understanding, defined by nearby utterances. In…
Modeling document structure is of great importance for discourse analysis and related applications. The goal of this research is to capture the document intent structure by modeling documents as a mixture of topic words and rhetorical…
Mental illness is one of the most pressing public health issues of our time. While counseling and psychotherapy can be effective treatments, our knowledge about how to conduct successful counseling conversations has been limited due to lack…
Human conversation is organized by an implicit chain of thoughts that manifests as timed speech acts. Capturing this causal pathway is key to building natural full-duplex interactive systems. We introduce a framework that enables reasoning…
Conversational implicatures are pragmatic inferences that require listeners to deduce the intended meaning conveyed by a speaker from their explicit utterances. Although such inferential reasoning is fundamental to human communication,…
The relationship between language and thought remains an unresolved philosophical issue. Existing viewpoints can be broadly categorized into two schools: one asserting their independence, and another arguing that language constrains…
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…
In social systems, meaning can be communicated in addition to underlying processes of the information exchange. Meaning processing incurs on information processing with hindsight, while information processing recursively follows the time…
Dialogue discourse parsing aims to uncover the internal structure of a multi-participant conversation by finding all the discourse~\emph{links} and corresponding~\emph{relations}. Previous work either treats this task as a series of…
When speaking or writing, people omit information that seems clear and evident, such that only part of the message is expressed in words. Especially in argumentative texts it is very common that (important) parts of the argument are implied…
Work in developmental psychology suggests that humans are predisposed to align their mental states with other individuals. This manifests principally in cooperative communication, that is, intentional communication geared towards aligning…
In emotional support conversations, unclear intentions can lead supporters to employ inappropriate strategies, inadvertently imposing their expectations or solutions on the seeker. Clearly defined intentions are essential for guiding both…
To adequately model mathematical arguments the analyst must be able to represent the mathematical objects under discussion and the relationships between them, as well as inferences drawn about these objects and relationships as the…
Artificial intelligence systems exhibit many useful capabilities, but they appear to lack understanding. This essay describes how we could go about constructing a machine capable of understanding. As John Locke (1689) pointed out words are…
Most definitions of ontology, viewed as a "specification of a conceptualization", agree on the fact that if an ontology can take different forms, it necessarily includes a vocabulary of terms and some specification of their meaning in…
Agents are a special kind of AI-based software in that they interact in complex environments and have increased potential for emergent behaviour. Explaining such emergent behaviour is key to deploying trustworthy AI, but the increasing…
Conversational grounding is a collaborative mechanism for establishing mutual knowledge among participants engaged in a dialogue. This experimental study analyzes information-seeking conversations to investigate the capabilities of large…
In this work, we propose to use linguistic annotations as a basis for a \textit{Discourse-Aware Semantic Self-Attention} encoder that we employ for reading comprehension on long narrative texts. We extract relations between discourse units,…
People convey information extremely effectively through spoken interaction using multiple channels of information transmission: the lexical channel of what is said, and the non-lexical channel of how it is said. We propose studying human…