In this paper we look at how children learn the underlying principles of commonsense reasoning, sometimes referred to as topoi, which are prevalent in everyday dialogue. By examining the utterances of two children in the CHILDES corpus for whom there is extensive longitudinal data, we show how children can elicit topoi from their parents by asking why-questions. This strategy for the rapid acquisition of topoi peaks at around age three, suggesting that it is a critical step in becoming a fully competent language user.

In this paper we examine different meaning representations that are commonly used in different natural language applications today and discuss their limits, both in terms of the aspects of the natural language meaning they are modelling and in terms of the aspects of the application for which they are used.

In this paper we argue that to make dialogue systems able to actively explain their decisions they can make use of enthymematic reasoning. We motivate why this is an appropriate strategy and integrate it within our own proof-theoretic dialogue manager framework based on linear logic. In particular, this enables a dialogue system to provide reasonable answers to why-questions that query information previously given by the system.

We use dialogue act recognition (DAR) to investigate how well BERT represents utterances in dialogue, and how fine-tuning and large-scale pre-training contribute to its performance. We find that while both the standard BERT pre-training and pretraining on dialogue-like data are useful, task-specific fine-tuning is essential for good performance.

This paper presents the results of systematic experimentation on the impact in duplicate question detection of different types of questions across both a number of established approaches and a novel, superior one used to address this language processing task. This study permits to gain a novel insight on the different levels of robustness of the diverse detection methods with respect to different conditions of their application, including the ones that approximate real usage scenarios.