Max Pinaroc


2022

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CueBot: Cue-Controlled Response Generation for Assistive Interaction Usages
Shachi H. Kumar | Hsuan Su | Ramesh Manuvinakurike | Max Pinaroc | Sai Prasad | Saurav Sahay | Lama Nachman
Ninth Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT-2022)

Conversational assistants are ubiquitous among the general population, however, these systems have not had an impact on people with disabilities, or speech and language disorders, for whom basic day-to-day communication and social interaction is a huge struggle. Language model technology can play a huge role in empowering these users and help them interact with others with less effort via interaction support. To enable this population, we build a system that can represent them in a social conversation and generate responses that can be controlled by the users using cues/keywords. We build models that can speed up this communication by suggesting relevant cues in the dialog response context. We also introduce a keyword-loss to lexically constrain the model response output. We present automatic and human evaluation of our cue/keyword predictor and the controllable dialog system to show that our models perform significantly better than models without control. Our evaluation and user study shows that keyword-control on end-to-end response generation models is powerful and can enable and empower users with degenerative disorders to carry out their day-to-day communication.