Canada

Positive emotion elicitation aims at evoking positive emotion states in human users in open-domain dialogue generation. However, most work focuses on inducing a single-dimension of positive sentiment using human annotated datasets, which limits the scale of the training dataset. In this paper, we propose to model various emotions in large unannotated conversations, such as joy, trust and anticipation, by leveraging a latent variable to control the emotional intention of the response. Our proposed emotion-eliciting-Conditional-Variational-AutoEncoder (EE-CVAE) model generates more diverse and emotionally-intelligent responses compared to single-dimension baseline models in human evaluation.

ACL 2023

Eliciting Rich Positive Emotions in Dialogue Generation

emotion elicitation

affective computing

dialogue generation

workshop paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
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The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

Two studies tested the hypothesis that a Large Language Model (LLM) can be used to model psychological change following exposure to influential input. The first study tested a generic mode of influence - the Illusory Truth Effect (ITE) - where earlier exposure to a statement boosts a later truthfulness test rating. Analysis of newly collected data from human and LLM-simulated subjects (1000 of each) showed the same pattern of effects in both populations; although with greater per statement variability for the LLM. The second study concerns a specific mode of influence – populist framing of news to increase its persuasion and political mobilization. Newly collected data from simulated subjects was compared to previously published data from a 15 country experiment on 7286 human participants. Several effects from the human study were replicated by the simulated study, including ones that surprised the authors of the human study by contradicting their theoretical expectations; but some significant relationships found in human data were not present in the LLM data. Together the two studies support the view that LLMs have potential to act as models of the effect of influence.

Large Language Models respond to Influence like Humans

When harmful social stereotypes are expressed on a public platform, they must be addressed in a way that educates and informs both the original poster and other readers, without causing offence or perpetuating new stereotypes. In this paper, we synthesize findings from psychology and computer science to propose a set of potential counter-stereotype strategies. We then automatically generate such counter-stereotypes using ChatGPT, and analyze their correctness and expected effectiveness at reducing stereotypical associations. We identify the strategies of denouncing stereotypes, warning of consequences, and using an empathetic tone as three promising strategies to be further tested.

What Makes a Good Counter-Stereotype? Evaluating Strategies for Automated Responses to Stereotypical Text

Facilitating healthy online deliberation in terms of sensemaking and collaboration of discussion participants proves extremely challenging due to a number of known negative effects of online communication on social media platforms. We start from concerns and aspirations about the use of existing online discussion systems as distilled in previous literature, we then combine them with lessons learned on design and engineering practices from our research team, to inform the design of an easy-to-use tool (BCause.app) that enables higher quality discussions than traditional social media. We describe the design of this tool, highlighting the main interaction features that distinguish it from common social media, namely: i. the low-cost argumentation structuring of the conversations with direct replies; ii. and the distinctive use of reflective feedback rather than appreciative-only feedback. We then present the results of a controlled A/B experiment in which we show that the presence of argumentative and cognitive reflective discussion elements produces better social interaction with less polarization and promotes a more cohesive discussion than common social media-like interactions.

BCause: Reducing group bias and promoting cohesive discussion in online deliberation processes through a simple and engaging online deliberation tool

Dialog participants sometimes align their linguistic styles, e.g., they use the same words and syntactic constructions as their interlocutors. We propose to investigate the notion of lexico-semantic alignment: to what extent do speakers convey the same meaning when they use the same words? We design measures of lexico-semantic alignment relying on contextualized word representations. We show that they
reflect interesting semantic differences between the two sides of a debate and that they can assist in the task of debate’s winner prediction.

Measuring Lexico-Semantic Alignment in Debates with Contextualized Word Representations

The expression of opinions, stances, and moral foundations on social media often coincide with toxic, divisive, or inflammatory language that can make constructive discourse across communities difficult. Natural language generation methods could provide a means to reframe or reword such expressions in a way that fosters more civil discourse, yet current Large Language Model (LLM) methods tend towards language that is too generic or formal to seem authentic for social media discussions. We present preliminary work on training LLMs to maintain authenticity while presenting a community's ideas and values in a constructive, non-toxic manner.

Detoxifying Online Discourse: A Guided Response Generation Approach for Reducing Toxicity in User-Generated Text

Planning for open-domain goal-oriented dialogue often requires simulating future dialogue interactions and estimating task progress. Many approaches thus consider training neural networks to perform look-ahead search algorithms such as A* search and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). However, this training often require abundant annotated data, which creates challenges when faced with noisy annotations or low-resource settings. We introduce GDP-Zero, an algorithm using few-shot prompting and Open-Loop MCTS to perform goal-oriented dialogue policy planning without any model training. We view goal-oriented dialogue as a stochastic game, and rather than training individual modules, we prompt a large language model to act as a policy prior, value function, user simulator, and system model during the tree search. We evaluate GDP-Zero statically on PersuasionForGood, and find that its responses are preferred over ChatGPT up to 59.32% of the time.

GDP-Zero: Prompt-Based Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Persuasive Dialogue Policy Planning

Linguistic style matching (LSM) in conversations can be reflective of several aspects of social influence such as power or persuasion. However, how LSM relates to the outcomes of online communication on platforms such as Reddit is an unknown question. In this study, we analyze a large corpus of two-party conversation threads in Reddit where we identify all occurrences of LSM using two types of style: the use of function words and formality. Using this framework, we examine how levels of LSM differ in conversations depending on several social factors within Reddit: post and subreddit features, conversation depth, user tenure, and the controversiality of a comment. Finally, we measure the change of LSM following loss of status after community banning. Our findings reveal the interplay of LSM in Reddit conversations with several community metrics, suggesting the importance of understanding conversation engagement when understanding community dynamics.

Exploring Linguistic Style Matching in Online Communities: The Role of Social Context and Conversation Dynamics

Norms, which are culturally accepted guide- lines for behaviours, can be integrated into conversational models to generate utterances that are appropriate for the socio-cultural context. Existing methods for norm recognition tend to focus only on surface-level features of dialogues and do not take into account the interactions within a conversation. To address this issue, we propose NormMark, a probabilistic generative Markov model to carry the latent features throughout a dialogue. These features are captured by discrete and continuous latent variables conditioned on the conversation history, and improve the model’s ability in norm recognition. The model is trainable on weakly annotated data using the variational technique. On a dataset with limited norm annotations, we show that our approach achieves higher F1 score, outperforming current state-of-the-art methods, including GPT3.

NormMark: A Weakly Supervised Markov Model for Socio-cultural Norm Discovery

Motivated by the question of the extent to which large language models "understand" social intelligence, we investigate the ability of such models to generate correct responses to questions involving descriptions of faux pas situations. The faux pas test is a test used in clinical psychology, which is known to be more challenging for children than individual tests of theory-of-mind or social intelligence. Our results demonstrate that, while the models seem to sometimes offer correct responses, they in fact struggle with this task, and that many of the seemingly correct responses can be attributed to over-interpretation by the human reader ("the ELIZA effect"). An additional phenomenon observed is the failure of most models to generate a correct response to presupposition questions. Finally, in an experiment in which the models are tasked with generating original faux pas stories, we find that while some models are capable of generating novel faux pas stories, the stories are all explicit, as the models are limited in their abilities to describe situations in an implicit manner.

How Well do Large Language Models Perform on Faux Pas Tests?

Experts across diverse disciplines are often interested in making sense of large text collections. Traditionally, this challenge is approached either by noisy unsupervised techniques such as topic models, or by following a manual theme discovery process. In this paper, we expand the definition of a theme to account for more than just a word distribution, and include generalized concepts deemed relevant by domain experts. Then, we propose an interactive framework that receives and encodes expert feedback at different levels of abstraction. Our framework strikes a balance between automation and manual coding, allowing experts to maintain control of their study while reducing the manual effort required.

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