Related papers: An Empirical Approach to Temporal Reference Resolu…

Conversational information access is an emerging research area. Currently, human evaluation is used for end-to-end system evaluation, which is both very time and resource intensive at scale, and thus becomes a bottleneck of progress. As an…

Evaluating open-domain dialogue systems is challenging for reasons such as the one-to-many problem, i.e., many appropriate responses other than just the golden response. As of now, automatic evaluation methods need better consistency with…

Reasoning about time is of fundamental importance. Many facts are time-dependent. For example, athletes change teams from time to time, and different government officials are elected periodically. Previous time-dependent question answering…

We study the problem of scheduling periodic real-time tasks so as to meet their individual minimum reward requirements. A task generates jobs that can be given arbitrary service times before their deadlines. A task then obtains rewards…

Explanation faithfulness of model predictions in natural language processing is typically evaluated on held-out data from the same temporal distribution as the training data (i.e. synchronous settings). While model performance often…

One critical issue for chat systems is to stay consistent about preferences, opinions, beliefs and facts of itself, which has been shown a difficult problem. In this work, we study methods to assess and bolster utterance consistency of chat…

Automatic dialogue response evaluator has been proposed as an alternative to automated metrics and human evaluation. However, existing automatic evaluators achieve only moderate correlation with human judgement and they are not robust. In…

Encoder-decoder based neural architectures serve as the basis of state-of-the-art approaches in end-to-end open domain dialog systems. Since most of such systems are trained with a maximum likelihood~(MLE) objective they suffer from issues…

$ $Dialogue systems are evaluated depending on their type and purpose. Two categories are often distinguished: (1) task-oriented dialogue systems (TDS), which are typically evaluated on utility, i.e., their ability to complete a specified…

Recent Iterated Response (IR) models of pragmatics conceptualize language use as a recursive process in which agents reason about each other to increase communicative efficiency. These models are generally defined over complete utterances.…

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…

Contract scheduling is a widely studied framework for designing real-time systems with interruptible capabilities. Previous work has showed that a prediction on the interruption time can help improve the performance of contract-based…

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems are required to identify key information from conversations for the completion of given tasks. Such information is conventionally specified in terms of intents and slots contained in task-specific…

We propose a scalable method for constructing a temporal opinion knowledge base with large language models (LLMs) as automated annotators. Despite the demonstrated utility of time-series opinion analysis of text for downstream applications…

Empathy, as defined in behavioral sciences, expresses the ability of human beings to recognize, understand and react to emotions, attitudes and beliefs of others. The lack of an operational definition of empathy makes it difficult to…

We propose a survey of the research contributions on the field of Educational Timetabling with a specific focus on "standard" formulations and the corresponding benchmark instances. We identify six of such formulations and we discuss their…

In this paper, we present a neural network based task-oriented dialogue system that can be optimized end-to-end with deep reinforcement learning (RL). The system is able to track dialogue state, interface with knowledge bases, and…

Pervasive and ubiquitous computing facilitates immediate access to information in the sense of always-on. Information such as news, messages, or reminders can significantly enhance our daily routines but are rendered useless or disturbing…

Task-oriented Dialog (ToD) systems have to solve multiple subgoals to accomplish user goals, whereas feedback is often obtained only at the end of the dialog. In this work, we propose SUIT (SUbgoal-aware ITerative Training), an iterative…

While research on dialogue response generation has primarily focused on generating coherent responses conditioning on textual context, the critical question of when to respond grounded on the temporal context remains underexplored. To…