相关论文: Balancing Objectives in Counseling Conversations: …

An agent's intention often remains hidden behind the black-box nature of embodied policies. Communication using natural language statements that describe the next action can provide transparency towards the agent's behavior. We aim to…

Virtual health counselors offer the potential to provide users with information and counseling in complex areas such as disease management and health education. However, ensuring user engagement is challenging, particularly when the volume…

In this study, we introduce the Conversation Progress Guide (CPG), a system designed for text-based conversational AI interactions that provides a visual interface to represent progress. Users often encounter failures when interacting with…

The acoustic background plays a crucial role in natural conversation. It provides context and helps listeners understand the environment, but a strong background makes it difficult for listeners to understand spoken words. The appropriate…

In a Conversational Image Recommendation task, users can provide natural language feedback on a recommended image item, which leads to an improved recommendation in the next turn. While typical instantiations of this task assume that the…

Negotiation is a crucial ability in human communication. Recently, there has been a resurgent research interest in negotiation dialogue systems, whose goal is to create intelligent agents that can assist people in resolving conflicts or…

In Conversational Recommendation Systems (CRS), the central question is how the conversational agent can naturally ask for user preferences and provide suitable recommendations. Existing works mainly follow the hierarchical architecture,…

Effectively addressing client resistance is a sophisticated clinical skill in psychological counseling, yet practitioners often lack timely and scalable supervisory feedback to refine their approaches. Although current NLP research has…

Spoken dialogue models currently lack the ability for fine-grained speech style control, a critical capability for human-like interaction that is often overlooked in favor of purely functional capabilities like reasoning and question…

With the growing complexity and capability of large language models, a need to understand model reasoning has emerged, often motivated by an underlying goal of controlling and aligning models. While numerous interpretability and steering…

Evaluation of conversational naturalness is essential for developing human-like speech agents. However, existing speech naturalness predictors are often designed to assess utterances from a single speaker, failing to capture…

Learning therapeutic counseling involves significant role-play experience with mock patients, with current manual training methods providing only intermittent granular feedback. We seek to accelerate and optimize counselor training by…

Explainable AI (XAI) techniques aim to provide insights into predictive models and enhance user performance, yet they often fall short of these expectations. Conversational XAI assistants promise to overcome such limitations, but empirical…

Assistive agents should make humans' lives easier. Classically, such assistance is studied through the lens of inverse reinforcement learning, where an assistive agent (e.g., a chatbot, a robot) infers a human's intention and then selects…

Condescending language use is caustic; it can bring dialogues to an end and bifurcate communities. Thus, systems for condescension detection could have a large positive impact. A challenge here is that condescension is often impossible to…

We introduce a model of negotiation dynamics whose aim is that of mimicking the mechanisms leading to opinion and convention formation in a population of individuals. The negotiation process, as opposed to ``herding-like'' or ``bounded…

Interpersonal conflict is an uncomfortable but unavoidable fact of life. Navigating conflict successfully is a skill -- one that can be learned through deliberate practice -- but few have access to effective training or feedback. To expand…

Sentence simplification aims to make sentences easier to read and understand. Recent approaches have shown promising results with sequence-to-sequence models which have been developed assuming homogeneous target audiences. In this paper we…

In this paper, we investigate deliberation procedures that invite citizens with contextual opinions to explore alternative thinking frames. Contextuality is captured in a simple quantum cognitive model. We show how disagreeing citizens…

In conversational search, agents can interact with users by asking clarifying questions to increase their chance to find better results. Many recent works and shared tasks in both NLP and IR communities have focused on identifying the need…