Current spoken dialogue systems initiate their turns after a long period of silence (700-1000ms), which leads to little real-time feedback, sluggish responses, and an overall stilted conversational flow. Humans typically respond within 200ms and successfully predicting initiation points in advance would allow spoken dialogue agents to do the same. In this work, we predict the lead-time to initiation using prosodic features from a pre-trained speech representation model (wav2vec 1.0) operating on user audio and word features from a pre-trained language model (GPT-2) operating on incremental transcriptions. To evaluate errors, we propose two metrics w.r.t. predicted and true lead times. We train and evaluate the models on the Switchboard Corpus and find that our method outperforms features from prior work on both metrics and vastly outperforms the common approach of waiting for 700ms of silence.

Automated storytelling has long captured the attention of researchers for the ubiquity of narratives in everyday life. The best human-crafted stories exhibit coherent plot, strong characters, and adherence to genres, attributes that current states-of-the-art still struggle to produce, even using transformer architectures. In this paper, we analyze works in story generation that utilize machine learning approaches to (1) address story generation controllability, (2) incorporate commonsense knowledge, (3) infer reasonable character actions, and (4) generate creative language.

Large-scale, transformer-based language models such as GPT-2 are pretrained on diverse corpora scraped from the internet. Consequently, they are prone to generating non-normative text (i.e. in violation of social norms). We introduce a technique for fine-tuning GPT-2, using a policy gradient reinforcement learning technique and a normative text classifier to produce reward and punishment values. We evaluate our technique on five data sets using automated and human participant experiments. The normative text classifier is 81-90% accurate when compared to gold-standard human judgements of normative and non-normative generated text. Our normative fine-tuning technique is able to reduce non-normative text by 27-61%, depending on the data set.