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Dialogue meaning representation formulates natural language utterance semantics in their conversational context in an explicit and machine-readable form. Previous work typically follows the intent-slot framework, which is easy for…
Dialogue topic segmentation is critical in several dialogue modeling problems. However, popular unsupervised approaches only exploit surface features in assessing topical coherence among utterances. In this work, we address this limitation…
Discourse analysis is an important task because it models intrinsic semantic structures between sentences in a document. Discourse markers are natural representations of discourse in our daily language. One challenge is that the markers as…
Large-scale language technologies are increasingly used in various forms of communication with humans across different contexts. One particular use case for these technologies is conversational agents, which output natural language text in…
A new generation of AI models generates step-by-step reasoning text before producing an answer. This text appears to offer a human-readable window into their computation process, and is increasingly relied upon for transparency and…
We present a chatbot implementing a novel dialogue management approach based on logical inference. Instead of framing conversation a sequence of response generation tasks, we model conversation as a collaborative inference process in which…
Discourse relations bind smaller linguistic elements into coherent texts. However, automatically identifying discourse relations is difficult, because it requires understanding the semantics of the linked sentences. A more subtle challenge…
The two principal areas of natural language processing research in pragmatics are belief modelling and speech act processing. Belief modelling is the development of techniques to represent the mental attitudes of a dialogue participant. The…
Conventional spoken language understanding systems consist of two main components: an automatic speech recognition module that converts audio to a transcript, and a natural language understanding module that transforms the resulting text…
It is claimed that a variety of facts concerning ellipsis, event reference, and interclausal coherence can be explained by two features of the linguistic form in question: (1) whether the form leaves behind an empty constituent in the…
The compositionality of meaning extends beyond the single sentence. Just as words combine to form the meaning of sentences, so do sentences combine to form the meaning of paragraphs, dialogues and general discourse. We introduce both a…
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) systems, including intelligent agents, must be able to explain their internal decisions, behaviours and reasoning that produce their choices to the humans (or other systems) with which they…
This paper examines the interplay of opinion exchange dynamics and communication network formation. An opinion formation procedure is introduced which is based on an abstract representation of opinions as $k$--dimensional bit--strings.…
A policy describes the conditions under which an action is permitted or forbidden. We show that a fragment of (multi-sorted) first-order logic can be used to represent and reason about policies. Because we use first-order logic, policies…
Although much has been said about parallelism in discourse, a formal, computational theory of parallelism structure is still outstanding. In this paper, we present a theory which given two parallel utterances predicts which are the parallel…
We describe a statistical approach for modeling dialogue acts in conversational speech, i.e., speech-act-like units such as Statement, Question, Backchannel, Agreement, Disagreement, and Apology. Our model detects and predicts dialogue acts…
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…
Designers of autonomous agents, whether in physical or virtual environments, need to express nondeterminisim, failure, and parallelism in behaviors, as well as accounting for synchronous coordination between agents. Behavior Trees are a…
We investigate the task of modeling open-domain, multi-turn, unstructured, multi-participant, conversational dialogue. We specifically study the effect of incorporating different elements of the conversation. Unlike previous efforts, which…
We present a model for pragmatically describing scenes, in which contrastive behavior results from a combination of inference-driven pragmatics and learned semantics. Like previous learned approaches to language generation, our model uses a…