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Certain spans of utterances in a discourse, referred to here as segments, are widely assumed to form coherent units. Further, the segmental structure of discourse has been claimed to constrain and be constrained by many phenomena. However,…
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…
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…
Speech-acts can have literal meaning as well as pragmatic meaning, but these both involve consequences typically intended by a speaker. Speech-acts can also have unintentional meaning, in which what is conveyed goes above and beyond what…
Most human interactions occur in the form of spoken conversations where the semantic meaning of a given utterance depends on the context. Each utterance in spoken conversation can be represented by many semantic and speaker attributes, and…
Topics play an important role in the global organisation of a conversation as what is currently discussed constrains the possible contributions of the participant. Understanding the way topics are organised in interaction would provide…
While there has been significant progress towards modelling coherence in written discourse, the work in modelling spoken discourse coherence has been quite limited. Unlike the coherence in text, coherence in spoken discourse is also…
Prior approaches to realizing mixed-initiative human--computer referential communication have adopted information-state or collaborative problem-solving approaches. In this paper, we argue for a new approach, inspired by coherence-based…
People in conversation entrain their linguistic behaviours through spontaneous alignment mechanisms [7] - both in face-to-face and computer-mediated communication (CMC) [8]. In CMC, one of the mechanisms through which linguistic entrainment…
Consistency is a long standing issue faced by dialogue models. In this paper, we frame the consistency of dialogue agents as natural language inference (NLI) and create a new natural language inference dataset called Dialogue NLI. We…
The problem of explaining inconsistency-tolerant reasoning in knowledge bases (KBs) is a prominent topic in Artificial Intelligence (AI). While there is some work on this problem, the explanations provided by existing approaches often lack…
Evaluating open-domain dialogue systems is difficult due to the diversity of possible correct answers. Automatic metrics such as BLEU correlate weakly with human annotations, resulting in a significant bias across different models and…
In this work, we systematically investigate how well current models of coherence can capture aspects of text implicated in discourse organisation. We devise two datasets of various linguistic alterations that undermine coherence and test…
Although many pretrained models exist for text or images, there have been relatively fewer attempts to train representations specifically for dialog understanding. Prior works usually relied on finetuned representations based on generic…
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…
In dialogues in which both agents are autonomous, each agent deliberates whether to accept or reject the contributions of the current speaker. A speaker cannot simply assume that a proposal or an assertion will be accepted. However, an…
Coherence across multiple turns is a major challenge for state-of-the-art dialogue models. Arguably the most successful approach to automatically learning text coherence is the entity grid, which relies on modelling patterns of distribution…
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…
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…
The explicit relationship among perception, communication, and design is being discussed in some detail, in order to relate it to characteristic details of the modeling of the world which defines the scientific and artistic activities of…