Related papers: Centering, Anaphora Resolution, and Discourse Stru…
Generalized Referring expressions can describe one object, several related objects, or none at all. Existing generalized referring segmentation (GRES) models treat all cases alike, predicting a single binary mask and ignoring how linguistic…
Given a metric space, the $(k,z)$-clustering problem consists of finding $k$ centers such that the sum of the of distances raised to the power $z$ of every point to its closest center is minimized. This encapsulates the famous $k$-median…
Large language models trained under diverse objectives and architectures have been shown to develop increasingly similar internal representations, an observation formalized as the Platonic Representation Hypothesis. Whether this…
This thesis is about the problem of compositionality in distributional semantics. Distributional semantics presupposes that the meanings of words are a function of their occurrences in textual contexts. It models words as distributions over…
Humans talk in daily conversations while aligning and negotiating the expressed meanings or common ground. Despite the impressive conversational abilities of the large generative language models, they do not consider the individual…
Document interpretation and dialog understanding are the two major challenges for conversational machine reading. In this work, we propose Discern, a discourse-aware entailment reasoning network to strengthen the connection and enhance the…
Transformer-based models excel in speech recognition. Existing efforts to optimize Transformer inference, typically for long-context applications, center on simplifying attention score calculations. However, streaming speech recognition…
Contextual memory integration remains a high challenge in the development of language models, particularly in tasks that require maintaining coherence over extended sequences. Traditional approaches, such as self-attention mechanisms and…
This paper introduces a novel method to diagnose the source-target attention in state-of-the-art end-to-end speech recognition models with joint connectionist temporal classification (CTC) and attention training. Our method is based on the…
Full-duplex spoken dialogue models (SDMs) can listen and speak simultaneously, enabling interaction dynamics closer to human conversation than turn-based systems. Inspired by neural coupling in human communication, we study how such models…
We model coherent conversation continuation via RNN-based dialogue models equipped with a dynamic attention mechanism. Our attention-RNN language model dynamically increases the scope of attention on the history as the conversation…
I present a unified account of interpretation preferences of stressed and unstressed pronouns in discourse. The central intuition is the Complementary Preference Hypothesis that predicts the interpretation preference of a stressed pronoun…
Existing speaker diarization systems typically rely on large amounts of manually annotated data, which is labor-intensive and difficult to obtain, especially in real-world scenarios. Additionally, language-specific constraints in these…
Many existing conversation models that are based on the encoder-decoder framework have focused on ways to make the encoder more complicated to enrich the context vectors so as to increase the diversity and informativeness of generated…
In-context learning enables language models (LM) to adapt to downstream data or tasks by incorporating few samples as demonstrations within the prompts. It offers strong performance without the expense of fine-tuning. However, the…
Ad-hoc distributed microphone environments, where microphone locations and numbers are unpredictable, present a challenge to traditional deep learning models, which typically require fixed architectures. To tailor deep learning models to…
Traditional dialog systems used in goal-oriented applications require a lot of domain-specific handcrafting, which hinders scaling up to new domains. End-to-end dialog systems, in which all components are trained from the dialogs…
There is mounting evidence that existing neural network models, in particular the very popular sequence-to-sequence architecture, struggle to systematically generalize to unseen compositions of seen components. We demonstrate that one of…
In dialogue systems, discourse plays a crucial role in managing conversational focus and coordinating interactions. It consists of two key structures: rhetorical structure and topic structure. The former captures the logical flow of…
Speaker diarization systems often struggle with high intrinsic intra-speaker variability, such as shifts in emotion, health, or content. This can cause segments from the same speaker to be misclassified as different individuals, for…