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Convincing someone of the truth value of a premise requires understanding and articulating the core logical structure of the argument which proves or disproves the premise. Understanding the logical structure of an argument refers to…
Children's early speech often bears little resemblance to that of adults, and yet parents and other caregivers are able to interpret that speech and react accordingly. Here we investigate how these adult inferences as listeners reflect…
This paper presents a computational model of how conversational participants collaborate in order to make a referring action successful. The model is based on the view of language as goal-directed behavior. We propose that the content of a…
Time is a crucial factor in modelling dynamic behaviours of intelligent agents: activities have a determined temporal duration in a real-world environment, and previous actions influence agents' behaviour. In this paper, we propose a…
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…
Online discourse is often perceived as polarized and unproductive. While some conversational discourse parsing frameworks are available, they do not naturally lend themselves to the analysis of contentious and polarizing discussions.…
Tuning language models for dialogue generation has been a prevalent paradigm for building capable dialogue agents. Yet, traditional tuning narrowly views dialogue generation as resembling other language generation tasks, ignoring the role…
Multi-party dialogues are more difficult for models to understand than one-to-one two-party dialogues, since they involve multiple interlocutors, resulting in interweaving reply-to relations and information flows. To step over these…
Building user trust in dialogue agents requires smooth and consistent dialogue exchanges. However, agents can easily lose conversational context and generate irrelevant utterances. These situations are called dialogue breakdown, where agent…
How can we better understand the mechanisms behind multi-turn information seeking dialogues? How can we use these insights to design a dialogue system that does not require explicit query formulation upfront as in question answering? To…
Humans often employ figurative language use in communication, including during interactions with dialog systems. Thus, it is important for real-world dialog systems to be able to handle popular figurative language constructs like metaphor…
A lively ongoing debate is taking place, since the extraordinary emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) with regards to their capability to understand the world and capture the meaning of the dialogues in which they are involved.…
Conversational implicatures are usually described as being licensed by the disobeying or flouting of some principle by the speaker in cooperative dialogue. However, such work has failed to distinguish cases of the speaker flouting such a…
We study improving social conversational agents by learning from natural dialogue between users and a deployed model, without extra annotations. To implicitly measure the quality of a machine-generated utterance, we leverage signals like…
The impact of user satisfaction in policy learning task-oriented dialogue systems has long been a subject of research interest. Most current models for estimating the user satisfaction either (i) treat out-of-context short-texts, such as…
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…
We show that explicit pragmatic inference aids in correctly generating and following natural language instructions for complex, sequential tasks. Our pragmatics-enabled models reason about why speakers produce certain instructions, and…
Language model representations often contain linear directions that correspond to high-level concepts. Here, we study the dynamics of these representations: how representations evolve along these dimensions within the context of (simulated)…
Dialog acts can be interpreted as the atomic units of a conversation, more fine-grained than utterances, characterized by a specific communicative function. The ability to structure a conversational transcript as a sequence of dialog acts…
Frequently we revise our first opinions after talking over with other individuals because we get convinced. Argumentation is a verbal and social process aimed at convincing. It includes conversation and persuasion. In this case, the…