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In this paper, we study whether transformer-based language models can extract predicate argument structure from simple sentences. We firstly show that language models sometimes confuse which predicates apply to which objects. To mitigate…

Human beings possess the most sophisticated computational machinery in the known universe. We can understand language of rich descriptive power, and communicate in the same environment with astonishing clarity. Two of the many contributors…

Discourse involves two perspectives: a person's intention in making an utterance and others' perception of that utterance. The misalignment between these perspectives can lead to undesirable outcomes, such as misunderstandings, low…

Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…

In current presence or availability systems, the method of presenting a user's state often supposes an instantaneous notion of that state - for example, a visualization is rendered or an inference is made about the potential actions that…

Persuasion is an important and yet complex aspect of human intelligence. When undertaken through dialogue, the deployment of good arguments, and therefore counterarguments, clearly has a significant effect on the ability to be successful in…

While a large body of work has scrutinized the meaning of conditional sentences, considerably less attention has been paid to formal models of their pragmatic use and interpretation. Here, we take a probabilistic approach to pragmatic…

It is recently demonstrated that cortical activity can track the time courses of phrases and sentences during speech listening. Here, we propose a plausible neural processing framework to explain this phenomenon. It is argued that the brain…

Dialogue systems often fail when user utterances are semantically complete yet lack the clarity and completeness required for appropriate system action. This mismatch arises because users frequently do not fully understand their own needs,…

In this introductory article we present the basics of an approach to implementing computational interpreting of natural language aiming to model the meanings of words and phrases. Unlike other approaches, we attempt to define the meanings…

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…

Effective interlocutors account for the uncertain goals, beliefs, and emotions of others. But even the best human conversationalist cannot perfectly anticipate the trajectory of a dialogue. How well can language models represent inherent…

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…

Deliberation plays an important role in the design of rational agents embedded in the real-world. In particular, deliberation leads to the formation of intentions, i.e., plans of action that the agent is committed to achieving. In this…

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…

Conversational modeling is an important task in natural language understanding and machine intelligence. Although previous approaches exist, they are often restricted to specific domains (e.g., booking an airline ticket) and require…

A discourse strategy is a strategy for communicating with another agent. Designing effective dialogue systems requires designing agents that can choose among discourse strategies. We claim that the design of effective strategies must take…

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 dialog studies, we often encode a dialog using a hierarchical encoder where each utterance is converted into an utterance vector, and then a sequence of utterance vectors is converted into a dialog vector. Since knowing who produced…

Deep neural networks have shown recent promise in many language-related tasks such as the modeling of conversations. We extend RNN-based sequence to sequence models to capture the long range discourse across many turns of conversation. We…