Related papers: Discourse Obligations in Dialogue Processing
Modeling dialog as a collaborative activity consists notably in specifying the content of the Conversational Common Ground and the kind of social mental state involved. In previous work (Saget, 2006), we claim that Collective Acceptance is…
This paper is about the flow of inference between communicative intentions, discourse structure and the domain during discourse processing. We augment a theory of discourse interpretation with a theory of distinct mental attitudes and…
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.…
The way in which discourse features express connections back to the previous discourse has been described in the literature in terms of adjoining at the right frontier of discourse structure. But this does not allow for discourse features…
Dialogue systems capable of social influence such as persuasion, negotiation, and therapy, are essential for extending the use of technology to numerous realistic scenarios. However, existing research primarily focuses on either…
We argue in this paper that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within discourse structure, instead work anaphorically to contribute relational meaning, with…
Predicting the structure of a discourse is challenging because relations between discourse segments are often implicit and thus hard to distinguish computationally. I extend previous work to classify implicit discourse relations by…
We outline how utterances in dialogs can be interpreted using a partial first order logic. We exploit the capability of this logic to talk about the truth status of formulae to define a notion of coherence between utterances and explain how…
In dialogical argumentation it is often assumed that the involved parties always correctly identify the intended statements posited by each other, realize all of the associated relations, conform to the three acceptability states (accepted,…
Complex conversation settings such as persuasion involve communicating changes in attitude or behavior, so users' perspectives need to be addressed, even when not directly related to the topic. In this work, we contribute a novel modular…
Statistical spoken dialogue systems usually rely on a single- or multi-domain dialogue model that is restricted in its capabilities of modelling complex dialogue structures, e.g., relations. In this work, we propose a novel dialogue model…
Discourse signals are often implicit, leaving it up to the interpreter to draw the required inferences. At the same time, discourse is embedded in a social context, meaning that interpreters apply their own assumptions and beliefs when…
Conversational implicatures are usually described as being licensed by the disobeying or flouting of a Principle of Cooperation. However, the specification of this principle has proved computationally elusive. In this paper we suggest that…
Humans often employ figurative language use in communication, including during interactions with dialog systems. Thus, it is important for real-world dialog systems to be able to handle popular figurative language constructs like metaphor…
There are many settings where it is useful to predict and explain the success or failure of a dialogue. Circumplex theory from psychology models the social orientations (e.g., Warm-Agreeable, Arrogant-Calculating) of conversation…
Goal-oriented conversational agents are becoming prevalent in our daily lives. For these systems to engage users and achieve their goals, they need to exhibit appropriate social behavior as well as provide informative replies that guide…
Growing literature explores toxicity and polarization in discourse, with comparatively less work on characterizing what makes dialogue prosocial and constructive. We explore conversational discourse and investigate a method for…
Establishing evaluation schemes for spoken dialogue systems is important, but it can also be challenging. While subjective evaluations are commonly used in user experiments, objective evaluations are necessary for research comparison and…
In this paper, we show how game-theoretic work on conversation combined with a theory of discourse structure provides a framework for studying interpretive bias. Interpretive bias is an essential feature of learning and understanding but…
Questions play a prominent role in social interactions, performing rhetorical functions that go beyond that of simple informational exchange. The surface form of a question can signal the intention and background of the person asking it, as…