Justine Cassell


2023

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How About Kind of Generating Hedges using End-to-End Neural Models?
Alafate Abulimiti | Chloé Clavel | Justine Cassell
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Hedging is a strategy for softening the impact of a statement in conversation. In reducing the strength of an expression, it may help to avoid embarrassment (more technically, “face threat”) to one’s listener. For this reason, it is often found in contexts of instruction, such as tutoring. In this work, we develop a model of hedge generation based on i) fine-tuning state-of-the-art language models trained on human-human tutoring data, followed by ii) reranking to select the candidate that best matches the expected hedging strategy within a candidate pool using a hedge classifier. We apply this method to a natural peer-tutoring corpus containing a significant number of disfluencies, repetitions, and repairs. The results show that generation in this noisy environment is feasible with reranking. By conducting an error analysis for both approaches, we reveal the challenges faced by systems attempting to accomplish both social and task-oriented goals in conversation.

2022

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You might think about slightly revising the title”: Identifying Hedges in Peer-tutoring Interactions
Yann Raphalen | Chloé Clavel | Justine Cassell
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Hedges have an important role in the management of rapport. In peer-tutoring, they are notably used by tutors in dyads experiencing low rapport to tone down the impact of instructions and negative feedback.Pursuing the objective of building a tutoring agent that manages rapport with teenagers in order to improve learning, we used a multimodal peer-tutoring dataset to construct a computational framework for identifying hedges. We compared approaches relying on pre-trained resources with others that integrate insights from the social science literature. Our best performance involved a hybrid approach that outperforms the existing baseline while being easier to interpret. We employ a model explainability tool to explore the features that characterize hedges in peer-tutoring conversations, and we identify some novel features, and the benefits of a such a hybrid model approach.

2016

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Socially-Aware Animated Intelligent Personal Assistant Agent
Yoichi Matsuyama | Arjun Bhardwaj | Ran Zhao | Oscar Romeo | Sushma Akoju | Justine Cassell
Proceedings of the 17th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

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Automatic Recognition of Conversational Strategies in the Service of a Socially-Aware Dialog System
Ran Zhao | Tanmay Sinha | Alan Black | Justine Cassell
Proceedings of the 17th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

2013

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Automatic Prediction of Friendship via Multi-model Dyadic Features
Zhou Yu | David Gerritsen | Amy Ogan | Alan Black | Justine Cassell
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2013 Conference

2012

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“Love ya, jerkface”: Using Sparse Log-Linear Models to Build Positive and Impolite Relationships with Teens
William Yang Wang | Samantha Finkelstein | Amy Ogan | Alan W Black | Justine Cassell
Proceedings of the 13th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

2010

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Report on the Second NLG Challenge on Generating Instructions in Virtual Environments (GIVE-2)
Alexander Koller | Kristina Striegnitz | Andrew Gargett | Donna Byron | Justine Cassell | Robert Dale | Johanna Moore | Jon Oberlander
Proceedings of the 6th International Natural Language Generation Conference

2009

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Validating the web-based evaluation of NLG systems
Alexander Koller | Kristina Striegnitz | Donna Byron | Justine Cassell | Robert Dale | Sara Dalzel-Job | Johanna Moore | Jon Oberlander
Proceedings of the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Conference Short Papers

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The Software Architecture for the First Challenge on Generating Instructions in Virtual Environments
Alexander Koller | Donna Byron | Justine Cassell | Robert Dale | Johanna Moore | Jon Oberlander | Kristina Striegnitz
Proceedings of the Demonstrations Session at EACL 2009

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Report on the First NLG Challenge on Generating Instructions in Virtual Environments (GIVE)
Donna Byron | Alexander Koller | Kristina Striegnitz | Justine Cassell | Robert Dale | Johanna Moore | Jon Oberlander
Proceedings of the 12th European Workshop on Natural Language Generation (ENLG 2009)

2008

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Reactive Redundancy and Listener Comprehension in Direction-Giving
Rachel Baker | Alastair Gill | Justine Cassell
Proceedings of the 9th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue

2007

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Proceedings of the Workshop on Embodied Language Processing
Justine Cassell | Dirk Heylen
Proceedings of the Workshop on Embodied Language Processing

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Coordination in Conversation and Rapport
Justine Cassell | Alastair Gill | Paul Tepper
Proceedings of the Workshop on Embodied Language Processing

2006

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Computational Measures for Language Similarity Across Time in Online Communities
David Huffaker | Joseph Jorgensen | Francisco Iacobelli | Paul Tepper | Justine Cassell
Proceedings of the Analyzing Conversations in Text and Speech

2005

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Teaching Dialogue to Interdisciplinary Teams through Toolkits
Justine Cassell | Matthew Stone
Proceedings of the Second ACL Workshop on Effective Tools and Methodologies for Teaching NLP and CL

2004

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Dialogue Systems that Can Handle Face-to-Face Joint Reference to Actions in Space
Justine Cassell
Proceedings of the 5th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue at HLT-NAACL 2004

2003

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Towards a Model of Face-to-Face Grounding
Yukiko Nakano | Gabe Reinstein | Tom Stocky | Justine Cassell
Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

2001

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Non-Verbal Cues for Discourse Structure
Justine Cassell | Yukiko Nakano | Timothy W. Bickmore | Candace L. Sidner | Charles Rich
Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

2000

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Coordination and context-dependence in the generation of embodied conversation
Justine Cassell | Matthew Stone | Hao Yan
INLG’2000 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Natural Language Generation

1997

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Semantic and Discourse Information for Text-to-Speech Intonation
Laurie Hiyakumoto | Scott Prevost | Justine Cassell
Concept to Speech Generation Systems