While improving neural dialogue agents' factual accuracy is the object of much research, another important aspect of communication, less studied in the setting of neural dialogue, is transparency about ignorance. In this work, we analyze to what extent state-of-the-art chit-chat models are linguistically calibrated in the sense that their verbalized expression of doubt (or confidence) matches the likelihood that the model's responses are factually incorrect (or correct). We find that these models are poorly calibrated, yet we show that likelihood of correctness can accurately be predicted. By incorporating such metacognitive features into the training of a controllable generation model, we obtain a dialogue agent with greatly improved linguistic calibration. While improving neural dialogue agents' factual accuracy is the object of much research, another important aspect of communication, less studied in the setting of neural dialogue, is transparency about ignorance. In this work, we analyze to what extent state-of-the-art chit-chat models are linguistically calibrated in the sense that their verbalized expression of doubt (or confidence) matches the likelihood that the model's responses are factually incorrect (or correct). We find that these models are poorly calibrated, yet we show that likelihood of correctness can accurately be predicted. By incorporating such metacognitive features into the training of a controllable generation model, we obtain a dialogue agent with greatly improved linguistic calibration.
Large-scale language technologies are increasingly used in various forms of communication with humans across different contexts. One particular use case for these technologies is conversational agents, which output natural language text in response to prompts and queries. This mode of engagement raises a number of social and ethical questions. For example, what does it mean to align conversational agents with human norms or values? Which norms or values should they be aligned with? And how can this be accomplished? In this paper, we propose a number of steps that help answer these questions. W…
PRHLT research center, Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学PRHLT研究中心）；Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bucharest（布加勒斯特大学数学与计算机科学学院）；CIIRC, Czech Technical University（捷克技术大学捷克信息学、机器人与控制论研究所）
The high prevalence of depression in society has given rise to the need for new digital tools to assist in its early detection. To this end, existing research has mainly focused on detecting depression in the domain of social media, where there is a sufficient amount of data. However, with the rise of conversational agents like Siri or Alexa, the conversational domain is becoming more critical. Unfortunately, there is a lack of data in the conversational domain. We perform a study focusing on domain adaptation from social media to the conversational domain. Our approach mainly exploits the lin…
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 users through tasks. The first component of the research in this paper applies statistical modeling techniques to understand conversations between users and human agents for customer service. Analyses show that social language used by human agents is associated with greater users' responsiveness and task completion. The second component of the research is the c…
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) meets more informal and free-form input data as voice user interfaces and conversational agents such as the voice assistants such as Alexa, Google Home, etc., gain popularity. Conversational speech is both the most difficult and environmentally relevant sort of data for speech recognition. In this paper, we take a linguistic perspective, and take the French language as a case study toward disambiguation of the French homophones. Our contribution aims to provide more insight into human speech transcription accuracy in conditions to reproduce those of state-of-…
Good communication is indubitably the foundation of effective teamwork. Over time teams develop their own communication styles and often exhibit entrainment, a conversational phenomena in which humans synchronize their linguistic choices. This paper examines the problem of predicting team performance from embeddings learned from multiparty dialogues such that teams with similar conflict scores lie close to one another in vector space. Embeddings were extracted from three types of features: 1) dialogue acts 2) sentiment polarity 3) syntactic entrainment. Although all of these features can be us…
Foviatech GmbH（Foviatech有限公司）；University of Hamburg（汉堡大学）
Many socio-linguistic cues are used in conversational analysis, such as emotion, sentiment, and dialogue acts. One of the fundamental cues is politeness, which linguistically possesses properties such as social manners useful in conversational analysis. This article presents findings of polite emotional dialogue act associations, where we can correlate the relationships between the socio-linguistic cues. We confirm our hypothesis that the utterances with the emotion classes Anger and Disgust are more likely to be impolite. At the same time, Happiness and Sadness are more likely to be polite. A…
University of Hamburg（汉堡大学）；Foviatech GmbH（Foviatech 有限公司）
Many socio-linguistic cues are used in the conversational analysis, such as emotion, sentiment, and dialogue acts. One of the fundamental social cues is politeness, which linguistically possesses properties useful in conversational analysis. This short article presents some of the brief findings of polite emotional dialogue acts, where we can correlate the relational bonds between these socio-linguistics cues. We found that the utterances with emotion classes Anger and Disgust are more likely to be impolite while Happiness and Sadness to be polite. Similar phenomenon occurs with dialogue acts,…
Building Trust in Conversational AI: A Comprehensive Review and Solution Architecture for Explainable, Privacy-Aware Systems using LLMs and Knowledge Graph
CeADAR - Ireland’s Centre for Applied AI, University College Dublin（爱尔兰应用人工智能中心CeADAR、都柏林大学学院）
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Würzburg（维尔茨堡大学）；Mila - Quebec AI Institute（米拉-魁北克人工智能研究所）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；PolyAI Limited（PolyAI有限公司）
In task-oriented dialogue (ToD), a user holds a conversation with an artificial agent to complete a concrete task. Although this technology represents one of the central objectives of AI and has been the focus of ever more intense research and development efforts, it is currently limited to a few narrow domains (e.g., food ordering, ticket booking) and a handful of languages (e.g., English, Chinese). This work provides an extensive overview of existing methods and resources in multilingual ToD as an entry point to this exciting and emerging field. We find that the most critical factor preventi…
Curiosity as Linguistic Intervention: Using LLM Tutoring Dialogues to Influence Exploratory Learning Behavior
School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学计算与信息系统学院）；Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学人机交互研究所）
For companies with customer service, mapping intents inside their conversational data is crucial in building applications based on natural language understanding (NLU). Nevertheless, there is no established automated technique to gather the intents from noisy online chats or voice transcripts. Simple clustering approaches are not suited to intent-sparse dialogues. To solve this intent-landscape task, we propose an unsupervised pipeline that extracts the intents and the taxonomy of intents from real-world dialogues. Our pipeline mines intent-span candidates with an extractive Question-Answering…
Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；University of Colorado（科罗拉多大学）
Interpersonal relations are fickle, with close friendships often dissolving into enmity. In this work, we explore linguistic cues that presage such transitions by studying dyadic interactions in an online strategy game where players form alliances and break those alliances through betrayal. We characterize friendships that are unlikely to last and examine temporal patterns that foretell betrayal. We reveal that subtle signs of imminent betrayal are encoded in the conversational patterns of the dyad, even if the victim is not aware of the relationship's fate. In particular, we find that lasting…
University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Microsoft Corporation, Redmond（微软公司）
Linguistic entrainment is a phenomenon where people tend to mimic each other in conversation. The core instrument to quantify entrainment is a linguistic similarity measure between conversational partners. Most of the current similarity measures are based on bag-of-words approaches that rely on linguistic markers, ignoring the overall language structure and dialogue context. To address this issue, we propose to use a neural network model to perform the similarity measure for entrainment. Our model is context-aware, and it further leverages a novel component to learn the shared high-level lingu…
Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；Crisis Text Line（危机短信热线）
Mental health counseling is an enterprise with profound societal importance where conversations play a primary role. In order to acquire the conversational skills needed to face a challenging range of situations, mental health counselors must rely on training and on continued experience with actual clients. However, in the absence of large scale longitudinal studies, the nature and significance of this developmental process remain unclear. For example, prior literature suggests that experience might not translate into consequential changes in counselor behavior. This has led some to even argue…
This work aims to build a dialogue agent that can weave new factual content into conversations as naturally as humans. We draw insights from linguistic principles of conversational analysis and annotate human-human conversations from the Switchboard Dialog Act Corpus to examine humans strategies for acknowledgement, transition, detail selection and presentation. When current chatbots (explicitly provided with new factual content) introduce facts into a conversation, their generated responses do not acknowledge the prior turns. This is because models trained with two contexts - new factual cont…
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Department of Computer Science, University of California Santa Barbara（加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校计算机科学系）；WeChat Search Application Department, Tencent（腾讯微信搜索应用部）
Different from other sequential data, sentences in natural language are structured by linguistic grammars. Previous generative conversational models with chain-structured decoder ignore this structure in human language and might generate plausible responses with less satisfactory relevance and fluency. In this study, we aim to incorporate the results from linguistic analysis into the process of sentence generation for high-quality conversation generation. Specifically, we use a dependency parser to transform each response sentence into a dependency tree and construct a training corpus of sente…
International Institute of Information Technology（国际信息技术学院）；LTRC（语言技术研究中心）
Human dialogue often contains utterances having meanings entirely different from the sentences used and are clearly understood by the interlocutors. But in human-computer interactions, the machine fails to understand the implicated meaning unless it is trained with a dataset containing the implicated meaning of an utterance along with the utterance and the context in which it is uttered. In linguistic terms, conversational implicatures are the meanings of the speaker's utterance that are not part of what is explicitly said. In this paper, we introduce a dataset of dialogue snippets with three …
Fondazione Bruno Kessler（布鲁诺·凯斯勒基金会）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）；Universitas Indonesia（印度尼西亚大学）
Most Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) approaches are supervised methods which require a significant amount of annotated corpus, and the annotation requires linguistic expertise. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Task Active Learning framework for Semantic Role Labeling with Entity Recognition (ER) as the auxiliary task to alleviate the need for extensive data and use additional information from ER to help SRL. We evaluate our approach on Indonesian conversational dataset. Our experiments show that multi-task active learning can outperform single-task active learning method and standard multi-task …
Institute for Logic, Language and Computation（逻辑、语言与计算研究所）；University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）
Dialogue participants often refer to entities or situations repeatedly within a conversation, which contributes to its cohesiveness. Subsequent references exploit the common ground accumulated by the interlocutors and hence have several interesting properties, namely, they tend to be shorter and reuse expressions that were effective in previous mentions. In this paper, we tackle the generation of first and subsequent references in visually grounded dialogue. We propose a generation model that produces referring utterances grounded in both the visual and the conversational context. To assess th…
Transformer-based models have demonstrated their effectiveness in automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks and even shown superior performance over the conventional hybrid framework. The main idea of Transformers is to capture the long-range global context within an utterance by self-attention layers. However, for scenarios like conversational speech, such utterance-level modeling will neglect contextual dependencies that span across utterances. In this paper, we propose to explicitly model the inter-sentential information in a Transformer based end-to-end architecture for conversational speec…
Conversational Text-to-Speech (TTS) aims to synthesis an utterance with the right linguistic and affective prosody in a conversational context. The correlation between the current utterance and the dialogue history at the utterance level was used to improve the expressiveness of synthesized speech. However, the fine-grained information in the dialogue history at the word level also has an important impact on the prosodic expression of an utterance, which has not been well studied in the prior work. Therefore, we propose a novel expressive conversational TTS model, termed as FCTalker, that lear…
University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学）；Department of Linguistics（语言学系）；Computational Linguistics（计算语言学）
Where early work on dialogue in Computational Linguistics put much emphasis on dialogue structure and its relation to the mental states of the dialogue participants (e.g., Allen 1979, Grosz & Sidner 1986), current work mostly reduces dialogue to the task of producing at any one time a next utterance; e.g. in neural chatbot or Visual Dialogue settings. As a methodological decision, this is sound: Even the longest journey is a sequence of steps. It becomes detrimental, however, when the tasks and datasets from which dialogue behaviour is to be learned are tailored too much to this framing of the…
Dialogue Quality and Emotion Annotations for Customer Support Conversations
INESC-ID（INESC-ID（葡萄牙国家系统与计算机工程研究所））；Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon（里斯本大学高等技术学院）；Faculdade de Letras, University of Lisbon（里斯本大学文学院）；Unbabel（Unbabel公司）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Phrase（Phrase公司）
