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This paper investigates how the topical flow of dyadic conversations emerges over time and how differences in interlocutors&#39; personality traits contribute to this topical flow. Leveraging text embeddings, we map the trajectories of N=1655 conversations between strangers into a high-dimensional space. Using nonlinear projections and clustering, we then identify when each interlocutor enters and exits various topics. Differences in conversational flow are quantified via topic entropy, a summary measure of the &quot;spread&quot; of topics covered during a conversation, and linguistic alignment, a time-varying measure of the cosine similarity between interlocutors&#39; embeddings. Our findings suggest that interlocutors with a larger difference in the personality dimension of openness influence each other to spend more time discussing a wider range of topics and that interlocutors with a larger difference in extraversion experience a larger decrease in linguistic alignment throughout their conversation. We also examine how participants&#39; affect (emotion) changes from before to after a conversation, finding that a larger difference in extraversion predicts a larger difference in affect change and that a greater topic entropy predicts a larger affect increase. This work demonstrates how communication research can be advanced through the use of high-dimensional NLP methods and identifies personality difference as an important driver of social influence.

EMNLP 2024

Personality Differences Drive Conversational Dynamics: A High-Dimensional NLP Approach

nonlinear projection

text embeddings

conversation analysis

personality

clustering

This paper investigates how the topical flow of dyadic conversations emerges over time and how differences in interlocutors' personality traits contribute to this topical flow. Leveraging text embeddings, we map the trajectories of N=1655 conversations between strangers into a high-dimensional space. Using nonlinear projections and clustering, we then identify when each interlocutor enters and exits various topics. Differences in conversational flow are quantified via topic entropy, a summary measure of the "spread" of topics covered during a conversation, and linguistic alignment, a time-varying measure of the cosine similarity between interlocutors' embeddings. Our findings suggest that interlocutors with a larger difference in the personality dimension of openness influence each other to spend more time discussing a wider range of topics and that interlocutors with a larger difference in extraversion experience a larger decrease in linguistic alignment throughout their conversation. We also examine how participants' affect (emotion) changes from before to after a conversation, finding that a larger difference in extraversion predicts a larger difference in affect change and that a greater topic entropy predicts a larger affect increase. This work demonstrates how communication research can be advanced through the use of high-dimensional NLP methods and identifies personality difference as an important driver of social influence.

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Information-Seeking Dialogue (ISD) agents aim to provide accurate responses to user queries. While proficient in directly addressing user queries, these agents, as well as LLMs in general, predominantly exhibit reactive behavior, lacking the ability to generate proactive responses that actively engage users in sustained conversations. However, existing definitions of proactive dialogue in this context do not focus on how each response actively engages the user and sustains the conversation. Hence, we present a new definition of proactivity that focuses on enhancing the `proactiveness' of each generated response via the introduction of new information related to the initial query. To this end, we construct a proactive dialogue dataset comprising 2,000 single-turn conversations, and introduce several automatic metrics to evaluate response 'proactiveness' which achieved high correlation with human annotation. Additionally, we introduce two innovative Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompts, the 3-step CoT and the 3-in-1 CoT prompts, which consistently outperform standard prompts by up to 90% in the zero-shot setting.

Redefining Proactivity for Information Seeking Dialogue

Code-mixing (CM), where speakers blend languages within a single expression, is prevalent in multilingual societies but poses challenges for natural language processing due to its complexity and limited data. We propose using a large language model to generate synthetic CM data, which is then used to enhance the performance of task-specific models for CM sentiment analysis. Our results show that in Spanglish, synthetic data improved the F1 score by 9.32\%, outperforming previous augmentation techniques. However, in Malayalam-English, synthetic data only helped when the baseline was low; with strong natural data, additional synthetic data offered little benefit. Human evaluation confirmed that this approach is a simple, cost-effective way to generate natural-sounding CM sentences, particularly beneficial for low baselines. Our findings suggest that few-shot prompting of large language models is a promising method for CM data augmentation and has significant impact on improving sentiment analysis, an important element in the development of social influence systems.

Leveraging Large Language Models for Code-Mixed Data Augmentation in Sentiment Analysis

The unchecked spread of digital information, combined with increasing political polariza- tion and the tendency of individuals to iso- late themselves from opposing political view- points, has driven researchers to develop sys- tems for automatically detecting political bias in media. This trend has been further fueled by discussions on social media. We explore methods for categorizing bias in US news arti- cles, comparing rule-based and deep learning approaches. The study highlights the sensi- tivity of modern self-learning systems to un- constrained data ingestion, while reconsider- ing the strengths of traditional rule-based sys- tems. Applying both models to left-leaning (CNN) and right-leaning (FOX) news articles, we assess their effectiveness on data beyond the original training and test sets. This analy- sis highlights each model’s accuracy, offers a framework for exploring deep-learning explain- ability, and sheds light on political bias in US news media. We contrast the opaque architec- ture of a deep learning model with the trans- parency of a linguistically informed rule-based model, showing that the rule-based model per- forms consistently across different data condi- tions and offers greater transparency, whereas the deep learning model is dependent on the training set and struggles with unseen data.

Balancing Transparency and Accuracy: A Comparative Analysis of Rule-Based and Deep Learning Models in Political Bias Classification

AI chatbots are increasingly designed to exhibit human-like traits such as empathy. However, how users perceive the empathy of these chatbots, and how this affects users' feelings about the conversation with them, has not been thoroughly examined. This study examines how the identity and perceived empathy of a chatbot affect human perceptions of the overall conversation quality. We analyzed 154 conversations from two datasets and found that, although GPT-based chatbots were rated significantly higher in overall conversational quality, they were perceived by users as having lower empathy compared to their human counterparts. Ratings of empathy from GPT-4o annotation align with human assessments, demonstrating a consistent perception of lower empathy in chatbots. However, off-the-shelf empathy models trained human-human conversations found no differences in perceived empathy in language between chatbots and humans. Our research emphasizes the importance of perceived empathy in influencing overall conversation quality. Managing perceived empathy in human-AI interactions is complex; creating chatbots that are perceived as high-conversational quality involves more than simply using empathetic language.

The Illusion of Empathy: How AI Chatbots Shape Conversation Perception

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at a range of tasks but often struggle with issues like hallucination and inadequate empathy support. To address hallucinations, we ground our dialogues in medical knowledge sourced from external repositories such as Disease Ontology and DrugBank. To improve empathy support, we develop the Empathetic Healthcare Dialogues dataset, which utilizes multiple dialogue strategies in each response. This dataset is then used to fine-tune an LLM, and we introduce a lightweight, adaptable method called Strategy Combination Guidance to enhance the emotional support capabilities of the fine-tuned model, named EHDChat. Our evaluations show that EHDChat significantly outperforms existing models in providing emotional support and medical accuracy, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing empathetic and informed AI interactions in healthcare.

EHDChat: A Knowledge-Grounded, Empathy-Enhanced Language Model for Healthcare Interactions

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is a challenging task in sentiment analysis, aiming to provide fine-grained insights into human sentiments. However, existing benchmarks are limited to two domains and do not evaluate model performance on unseen domains, raising concerns about the generalization of proposed methods. Furthermore, it remains unclear if large language models (LLMs) can effectively handle complex sentiment tasks like ASTE. In this work, we address the issue of generalization in ASTE from both a benchmarking and modeling perspective. We introduce a domain-expanded benchmark by annotating samples from diverse domains, enabling evaluation of models in both in-domain and out-of-domain settings. Additionally, we propose CASE, a simple and effective decoding strategy that enhances trustworthiness and performance of LLMs in ASTE. Through comprehensive experiments involving multiple tasks, settings, and models, we demonstrate that CASE can serve as a general decoding strategy for complex sentiment tasks. By expanding the scope of evaluation and providing a more reliable decoding strategy, we aim to inspire the research community to reevaluate the generalizability of benchmarks and models for ASTE. Our code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/domain-expanded-aste.

Domain-Expanded ASTE: Rethinking Generalization in Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

East Asian idioms are a type of figurative language, each condensing its rich cultural background into a few characters. Translating such idioms is challenging for human translators, who often resort to choosing a context-aware translation from an existing list of candidates. However, compiling a dictionary of translations demands much time and creativity even for expert translators. To alleviate such burden, we evaluate if GPT-4 can help generate high-quality translations. Based on automatic evaluations of faithfulness and creativity, we first identify Pareto-optimal prompting strategies that can outperform translation engines from Google and DeepL. Then, at a low cost, our context-aware translations can achieve far more and higher-quality translations per idiom than the human baseline. We open-source all code and data to facilitate further research.

Creative and Context-Aware Translation of East Asian Idioms with GPT-4

In this paper, we discuss multilingual vocabulary for neural machine translation models. Multilingual vocabularies should generate highly accurate machine translations regardless of the languages, and have preferences so that tokenized strings contain rare out-of-vocabulary (OOV) tokens and token sequences are short. In this paper, we discuss the characteristics of various multilingual vocabularies via tokenization and translation experiments. We also present our recommended vocabulary and tokenizer.

An Empirical Study of Multilingual Vocabulary for Neural Machine Translation Models

Many low-resource languages, such as Prakrit, present significant linguistic complexities and have limited modern-day resources. These languages often have multiple derivatives; for example, Prakrit, a language in use by masses around 2500 years ago for 500 years, includes Pali, Gandhari, and Tibetan, which encompass a vast body of Buddhist literature, as well as Ardhamagadhi, rich in Jain literature. Despite these challenges, these languages are invaluable for their historical, religious, and cultural insights needed by non-language experts and others.

To explore and understand the deep knowledge within these ancient texts for non-language experts, we propose a novel approach: translating multiple dialects of the parent language into a contemporary language and then enabling them to interact with the system in their native language, including English, Hindi, French and German, through a question-and-answer interface built on Large Language Models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this novel AI-Tutor system by focusing on Ardhamagadhi and Pali.

AI-Tutor: Interactive Learning of Ancient Knowledge from Low-Resource Languages

Large language models excel at creative generation but continue to struggle with the issues of hallucination and bias. While retrievalaugmented generation (RAG) provides a framework for grounding LLMs’ responses in accurate and up-to-date information, it still raises the question of bias: which sources should be selected for inclusion in the context? And how should their importance be weighted? In this paper, we study the challenge of cross-lingual RAG and present a dataset to investigate the robustness of existing systems at answering queries about geopolitical disputes, which exist at the intersection of linguistic, cultural, and political boundaries. Our dataset is sourced from Wikipedia pages containing information relevant to the given queries and we investigate the impact of including additional context, as well as the composition of this context in terms of language and source, on an LLM’s response. Our results show that existing RAG systems continue to be challenged by crosslingual use cases and suffer from a lack of consistency when they are provided with competing information in multiple languages. We present case studies to illustrate these issues and outline steps for future research to address these challenges. We make our dataset and code publicly available.

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Redefining Proactivity for Information Seeking Dialogue

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