The ability to handle miscommunication is crucial to robust and faithful conversational AI. People usually deal with miscommunication immediately as they detect it, using highly systematic interactional mechanisms called repair. One important type of repair is Third Position Repair (TPR) whereby a speaker is initially misunderstood but then corrects the misunderstanding as it becomes apparent after the addressee’s erroneous response. Here, we collect and publicly release REPAIR-QA, the first large dataset of TPRs in a conversational question answering (QA) setting. The data is comprised of the TPR turns, corresponding dialogue contexts, and candidate repairs of the original turn for execution of TPRs. We demonstrate the usefulness of the data by training and evaluating strong baseline models for executing TPRs. For stand-alone TPR execution, we perform both automatic and human evaluations on a fine-tuned T5 model, as well as OpenAI’s GPT-3 LLMs. Additionally, we extrinsically evaluate the LLMs’ TPR processing capabilities in the downstream conversational QA task. The results indicate poor out-of-the-box performance on TPR’s by the GPT-3 models, which then significantly improves when exposed to REPAIR-QA.

Large language models are known to produce output which sounds fluent and convincing, but is also often wrong, e.g. “unfaithful” with respect to a rationale as retrieved from a knowledge base. In this paper, we show that task-based systems which exhibit certain advanced linguistic dialog behaviors, such as lexical alignment (repeating what the user said), are in fact preferred and trusted more, whereas other phenomena, such as pronouns and ellipsis are dis-preferred. We use open-domain question answering systems as our test-bed for task based dialog generation and compare several open- and closed-book models. Our results highlight the danger of systems that appear to be trustworthy by parroting user input while providing an unfaithful response.

Recognition of social signals, coming from human facial expressions or prosody of human speech, is a popular research topic in human-robot interaction studies. There is also a long line of research in the spoken dialogue community that investigates user satisfaction in relation to dialogue characteristics. However, very little research relates a combination of multimodal social signals and language features detected during spoken face-to-face human-robot interaction to the resulting user perception of a robot. In this paper we show how different emotional facial expressions of human users, in combination with prosodic characteristics of human speech and features of human-robot dialogue, correlate with users’ impressions of the robot after a conversation. We find that happiness in the user’s recognised facial expression strongly correlates with likeability of a robot, while dialogue-related features (such as number of human turns or number of sentences per robot utterance) correlate with perceiving a robot as intelligent. In addition, we show that the facial expression emotional features and prosody are better predictors of human ratings related to perceived robot likeability and anthropomorphism, while linguistic and non-linguistic features more often predict perceived robot intelligence and interpretability. As such, these characteristics may in future be used as an online reward signal for in-situ Reinforcement Learning-based adaptive human-robot dialogue systems.