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In dialogues, an utterance is a chain of consecutive sentences produced by one speaker which ranges from a short sentence to a thousand-word post. When studying dialogues at the utterance level, it is not uncommon that an utterance would…
Non-sentential utterances (NSUs) are utterances that lack a complete sentential form but whose meaning can be inferred from the dialogue context, such as "OK", "where?", "probably at his apartment". The interpretation of non-sentential…
Conversations abound with uncetainties of various kinds. Treating conversation as inference and decision making under uncertainty, we propose a task independent, multimodal architecture for supporting robust continuous spoken dialog called…
Discourse coherence plays an important role in the translation of one text. However, the previous reported models most focus on improving performance over individual sentence while ignoring cross-sentence links and dependencies, which…
A long-term goal of machine learning is to build intelligent conversational agents. One recent popular approach is to train end-to-end models on a large amount of real dialog transcripts between humans (Sordoni et al., 2015; Vinyals & Le,…
Large language models have recently shown promising progress in mathematical reasoning when fine-tuned with human-generated sequences walking through a sequence of solution steps. However, the solution sequences are not formally structured…
Much of human dialogue occurs in semi-cooperative settings, where agents with different goals attempt to agree on common decisions. Negotiations require complex communication and reasoning skills, but success is easy to measure, making this…
Understanding natural language requires common sense, one aspect of which is the ability to discern the plausibility of events. While distributional models -- most recently pre-trained, Transformer language models -- have demonstrated…
Dialogical argumentation is an important cognitive activity by which agents exchange arguments and counterarguments as part of some process such as discussion, debate, persuasion and negotiation. Whilst numerous formal systems have been…
As practitioners increasingly deploy machine learning models in critical domains such as health care, finance, and policy, it becomes vital to ensure that domain experts function effectively alongside these models. Explainability is one way…
Explanations of model behavior are commonly evaluated via proxy properties weakly tied to the purposes explanations serve in practice. We contribute a decision theoretic framework that treats explanations as information signals valued by…
Agents that negotiate with humans find broad applications in pedagogy and conversational AI. Most efforts in human-agent negotiations rely on restrictive menu-driven interfaces for communication. To advance the research in language-based…
The nouns of our language refer to either concrete entities (like a table) or abstract concepts (like justice or love), and cognitive psychology has established that concreteness influences how words are processed. Accordingly,…
Discourse processing suffers from data sparsity, especially for dialogues. As a result, we explore approaches to build discourse structures for dialogues, based on attention matrices from Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). We investigate…
Sharing ideas through communication with peers is the primary mode of human interaction. Consequently, extensive research has been conducted in the area of conversational AI, leading to an increase in the availability and diversity of…
We predict discourse segment boundaries from linguistic features of utterances, using a corpus of spoken narratives as data. We present two methods for developing segmentation algorithms from training data: hand tuning and machine learning.…
Does the effectiveness of neural language models derive entirely from accurate modeling of surface word co-occurrence statistics, or do these models represent and reason about the world they describe? In BART and T5 transformer language…
Language models are increasingly being used in important decision pipelines, so ensuring the correctness of their outputs is crucial. Recent work has proposed evaluating the "factuality" of claims decomposed from a language model generation…
Existing research studies on cross-sentence relation extraction in long-form multi-party conversations aim to improve relation extraction without considering the explainability of such methods. This work addresses that gap by focusing on…
User intent understanding is a crucial step in designing both conversational agents and search engines. Detecting or inferring user intent is challenging, since the user utterances or queries can be short, ambiguous, and contextually…