Related papers: Discourse Obligations in Dialogue Processing
Conversational agents, also known as chatbots, are versatile tools that have the potential of being used in dialogical argumentation. They could possibly be deployed in tasks such as persuasion for behaviour change (e.g. persuading people…
When we communicate with other humans, we do not simply generate a sequence of words. Rather, we use our cognitive state (beliefs, desires, intentions) and our model of the audience's cognitive state to create utterances that affect the…
We provide formal definitions of degree of blameworthiness and intention relative to an epistemic state (a probability over causal models and a utility function on outcomes). These, together with a definition of actual causality, provide…
Our research is focused on making a human-like question answering system which can answer rationally. The distinguishing characteristic of our approach is that it will use automated common sense reasoning to truly "understand" dialogues,…
The semantic understanding of natural dialogues composes of several parts. Some of them, like intent classification and entity detection, have a crucial role in deciding the next steps in handling user input. Handling each task as an…
We describe a system for building task-oriented dialogue systems combining the in-context learning abilities of large language models (LLMs) with the deterministic execution of business logic. LLMs are used to translate between the surface…
This paper explains why scripted dialogue shares some crucial properties with discourse. In particular, when scripted dialogues are generated by a Natural Language Generation system, the generator can apply revision strategies that cannot…
People often interact repeatedly: with relatives, through file sharing, in politics, etc. Many such interactions are reciprocal: reacting to the actions of the other. In order to facilitate decisions regarding reciprocal interactions, we…
The predominant approach to open-domain dialog generation relies on end-to-end training of neural models on chat datasets. However, this approach provides little insight as to what these models learn (or do not learn) about engaging in…
Large language models (LLMs) are excellent at maintaining high-level, convincing dialogue, but it remains unclear whether their persuasive success reflects genuine understanding of the discourse. We examine this question through informal…
Dialogue Act (DA) classification is the task of classifying utterances with respect to the function they serve in a dialogue. Existing approaches to DA classification model utterances without incorporating the turn changes among speakers…
In this paper, we show that investigating the interaction of conversational type (often known as language game or speech genre) with the character types of the interlocutors is worthwhile. We present a method of calculating the decision…
We describe a class of tasks called decision-oriented dialogues, in which AI assistants such as large language models (LMs) must collaborate with one or more humans via natural language to help them make complex decisions. We formalize…
The notion of argumentation and the one of belief stand in a problematic relation to one another. On the one hand, argumentation is crucial for belief formation: as the outcome of a process of arguing, an agent might come to (justifiably)…
Opponent modeling is the task of inferring another party's mental state within the context of social interactions. In a multi-issue negotiation, it involves inferring the relative importance that the opponent assigns to each issue under…
There is a mismatch between psychological and computational studies on emotions. Psychological research aims at explaining and documenting internal mechanisms of these phenomena, while computational work often simplifies them into labels.…
Mixed-initiative dialogue tasks involve repeated exchanges of information and conversational control. Conversational agents gain control by generating responses that follow particular dialogue intents or strategies, prescribed by a policy…
Recent debates over adults' theory of mind use have been fueled by surprising failures of perspective-taking in communication, suggesting that perspective-taking can be relatively effortful. How, then, should speakers and listeners allocate…
In cooperative human decision-making, agreements are often not total; a partial degree of agreement is sufficient to commit to a decision and move on, as long as one is somewhat confident that the involved parties are likely to stand by…
Sequence to sequence models attempt to capture the correlation between all the words in the input and output sequences. While this is quite useful for machine translation where the correlation among the words is indeed quite strong, it…