Articles

AbstractNowadays Personal Assistants (PAs) are available in multiple environments and become increasingly popular to use via voice. Therefore, we aim to provide proactive PA suggestions to car drivers via speech. These suggestions should be neither obtrusive nor increase the drivers’ cognitive load, while enhancing user experience. To assess these factors, …...

AbstractExpressing emotion is known as an efficient way to persuade one’s dialogue partner to accept one’s claim or proposal. Emotional expression in speech can express the speaker’s emotion more directly than using only emotion expression in the text, which will lead to a more persuasive dialogue. In this paper, we …...

AbstractTime-Offset Interaction Applications (TOIAs) are systems that simulate face-to-face conversations between humans and digital human avatars recorded in the past. Developing a well-functioning TOIA involves several research areas: artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, question answering, and dialogue systems. The first challenges are to define a sensible methodology for …...

AbstractCheese! is a conversational corpus. It consists of 11 French face-to-face conversations lasting around 15 minutes each. Cheese! is a duplication of an American corpus (ref) in order to conduct a cross-cultural comparison of participants’ smiling behavior in humorous and non-humorous sequences in American English and French conversations. In this …...

AbstractHuman conversations are complicated and building a human-like dialogue agent is an extremely challenging task. With the rapid development of deep learning techniques, data-driven models become more and more prevalent which need a huge amount of real conversation data. In this paper, we construct a large-scale real scenario Chinese E-commerce …...

AbstractAn important objective in health-technology is the ability to gather information about people’s well-being. Structured interviews can be used to obtain this information, but are time-consuming and not scalable. Questionnaires provide an alternative way to extract such information, though typically lack depth. In this paper, we present our first prototype …...

AbstractThere are high expectations for multimodal dialog systems that can make natural small talk with facial expressions, gestures, and gaze actions as next-generation dialog-based systems. Two important roles of the chat-talk system are keeping the user engaged and establishing rapport. Many studies have conducted user evaluations of such systems, some …...

AbstractRecommendation systems aim at facilitating information retrieval for users by taking into account their preferences. Based on previous user behaviour, such a system suggests items or provides information that a user might like or find useful. Nonetheless, how to provide suggestions is still an open question. Depending on the way …...

AbstractConversational Question Answering (CQA) systems meet user information needs by having conversations with them, where answers to the questions are retrieved from text. There exist a variety of datasets for English, with tens of thousands of training examples, and pre-trained language models have allowed to obtain impressive results. The goal …...

AbstractFor every patient’s visit to a clinician, a clinical note is generated documenting their medical conversation, including complaints discussed, treatments, and medical plans. Despite advances in natural language processing, automating clinical note generation from a clinic visit conversation is a largely unexplored area of research. Due to the idiosyncrasies of …...

AbstractNatural Language Image Editing (NLIE) aims to use natural language instructions to edit images. Since novices are inexperienced with image editing techniques, their instructions are often ambiguous and contain high-level abstractions which require complex editing steps. Motivated by this inexperience aspect, we aim to smooth the learning curve by teaching …...

AbstractAutomated writing evaluation is a popular research field, but the main focus has been on evaluating argumentative essays. In this paper, we consider a different genre, namely précis texts. A précis is a written text that provides a coherent summary of main points of a spoken or written text. We …...

AbstractThe paper presents quality focused approach to a learner corpus development. The methodology was developed with multiple design considerations put in place to make the annotation process easier and at the same time reduce the amount of mistakes that could be introduced due to inconsistent text correction or carelessness. The …...

AbstractWe present the first version of the longitudinal Revita Learner Corpus (ReLCo), for Russian. In contrast to traditional learner corpora, ReLCo is collected and annotated fully automatically, while students perform exercises using the Revita language-learning platform. The corpus currently contains 8 422 sentences exhibiting several types of errors—grammatical, lexical, orthographic, …...

AbstractThis paper describes “TLT-school” a corpus of speech utterances collected in schools of northern Italy for assessing the performance of students learning both English and German. The corpus was recorded in the years 2017 and 2018 from students aged between nine and sixteen years, attending primary, middle and high school. …...

AbstractMultiWOZ 2.0 (Budzianowski et al., 2018) is a recently released multi-domain dialogue dataset spanning 7 distinct domains and containing over 10,000 dialogues. Though immensely useful and one of the largest resources of its kind to-date, MultiWOZ 2.0 has a few shortcomings. Firstly, there are substantial noise in the dialogue state …...

AbstractThis paper introduces a new web system that integrates English Grammatical Error Detection (GED) and course-specific stylistic guidelines to automatically review and provide feedback on student assignments. The system is being developed as a pedagogical tool for English Scientific Writing. It uses both general NLP methods and high precision parsers …...

AbstractRevision plays a major role in writing and the analysis of writing processes. Revisions can be analyzed using a product-oriented approach (focusing on a finished product, the text that has been produced) or a process-oriented approach (focusing on the process that the writer followed to generate this product). Although several …...

AbstractThe use of Augmented Reality (AR) in teaching and learning contexts for language is still young. The ideas are endless, the concrete educational offers available emerge only gradually. Educational opportunities that were unthinkable a few years ago are now feasible. We present a concrete realization: an executable application for mobile …...

AbstractThe Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) defines six levels of learner proficiency, and links them to particular communicative abilities. The CEFRLex project aims at compiling lexical resources that link single words and multi-word expressions to particular CEFR levels. The resources are thought to reflect second language learner …...