Gabriel Skantze


2023

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Response-conditioned Turn-taking Prediction
Bing’er Jiang | Erik Ekstedt | Gabriel Skantze
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Previous approaches to turn-taking and response generation in conversational systems have treated it as a two-stage process: First, the end of a turn is detected (based on conversation history), then the system generates an appropriate response. Humans, however, do not take the turn just because it is likely, but also consider whether what they want to say fits the position. In this paper, we present a model (an extension of TurnGPT) that conditions the end-of-turn prediction on both conversation history and what the next speaker wants to say. We found that our model consistently outperforms the baseline model in a variety of metrics. The improvement is most prominent in two scenarios where turn predictions can be ambiguous solely from the conversation history: 1) when the current utterance contains a statement followed by a question; 2) when the end of the current utterance semantically matches the response. Treating the turn-prediction and response-ranking as a one-stage process, our findings suggest that our model can be used as an incremental response ranker, which can be applied in various settings.

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Using Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Natural Language Generation from Knowledge Graphs
Agnes Axelsson | Gabriel Skantze
Proceedings of the Workshop on Multimodal, Multilingual Natural Language Generation and Multilingual WebNLG Challenge (MM-NLG 2023)

In any system that uses structured knowledge graph (KG) data as its underlying knowledge representation, KG-to-text generation is a useful tool for turning parts of the graph data into text that can be understood by humans. Recent work has shown that models that make use of pretraining on large amounts of text data can perform well on the KG-to-text task, even with relatively little training data on the specific graph-to-text task. In this paper, we build on this concept by using large language models to perform zero-shot generation based on nothing but the model’s understanding of the triple structure from what it can read. We show that ChatGPT achieves near state-of-the-art performance on some measures of the WebNLG 2020 challenge, but falls behind on others. Additionally, we compare factual, counter-factual and fictional statements, and show that there is a significant connection between what the LLM already knows about the data it is parsing and the quality of the output text.

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Resolving References in Visually-Grounded Dialogue via Text Generation
Bram Willemsen | Livia Qian | Gabriel Skantze
Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown to be effective at image retrieval based on simple text queries, but text-image retrieval based on conversational input remains a challenge. Consequently, if we want to use VLMs for reference resolution in visually-grounded dialogue, the discourse processing capabilities of these models need to be augmented. To address this issue, we propose fine-tuning a causal large language model (LLM) to generate definite descriptions that summarize coreferential information found in the linguistic context of references. We then use a pretrained VLM to identify referents based on the generated descriptions, zero-shot. We evaluate our approach on a manually annotated dataset of visually-grounded dialogues and achieve results that, on average, exceed the performance of the baselines we compare against. Furthermore, we find that using referent descriptions based on larger context windows has the potential to yield higher returns.

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The Open-domain Paradox for Chatbots: Common Ground as the Basis for Human-like Dialogue
Gabriel Skantze | A. Seza Doğruöz
Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

There is a surge in interest in the development of open-domain chatbots, driven by the recent advancements of large language models. The “openness” of the dialogue is expected to be maximized by providing minimal information to the users about the common ground they can expect, including the presumed joint activity. However, evidence suggests that the effect is the opposite. Asking users to “just chat about anything” results in a very narrow form of dialogue, which we refer to as the “open-domain paradox”. In this position paper, we explain this paradox through the theory of common ground as the basis for human-like communication. Furthermore, we question the assumptions behind open-domain chatbots and identify paths forward for enabling common ground in human-computer dialogue.

2022

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Annotation of Communicative Functions of Short Feedback Tokens in Switchboard
Carol Figueroa | Adaeze Adigwe | Magalie Ochs | Gabriel Skantze
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

There has been a lot of work on predicting the timing of feedback in conversational systems. However, there has been less focus on predicting the prosody and lexical form of feedback given their communicative function. Therefore, in this paper we present our preliminary annotations of the communicative functions of 1627 short feedback tokens from the Switchboard corpus and an analysis of their lexical realizations and prosodic characteristics. Since there is no standard scheme for annotating the communicative function of feedback we propose our own annotation scheme. Although our work is ongoing, our preliminary analysis revealed lexical tokens such as “yeah” are ambiguous and therefore lexical forms alone are not indicative of the function. Both the lexical form and prosodic characteristics need to be taken into account in order to predict the communicative function. We also found that feedback functions have distinguishable prosodic characteristics in terms of duration, mean pitch, pitch slope, and pitch range.

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Collecting Visually-Grounded Dialogue with A Game Of Sorts
Bram Willemsen | Dmytro Kalpakchi | Gabriel Skantze
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

An idealized, though simplistic, view of the referring expression production and grounding process in (situated) dialogue assumes that a speaker must merely appropriately specify their expression so that the target referent may be successfully identified by the addressee. However, referring in conversation is a collaborative process that cannot be aptly characterized as an exchange of minimally-specified referring expressions. Concerns have been raised regarding assumptions made by prior work on visually-grounded dialogue that reveal an oversimplified view of conversation and the referential process. We address these concerns by introducing a collaborative image ranking task, a grounded agreement game we call “A Game Of Sorts”. In our game, players are tasked with reaching agreement on how to rank a set of images given some sorting criterion through a largely unrestricted, role-symmetric dialogue. By putting emphasis on the argumentation in this mixed-initiative interaction, we collect discussions that involve the collaborative referential process. We describe results of a small-scale data collection experiment with the proposed task. All discussed materials, which includes the collected data, the codebase, and a containerized version of the application, are publicly available.

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How Much Does Prosody Help Turn-taking? Investigations using Voice Activity Projection Models
Erik Ekstedt | Gabriel Skantze
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

Turn-taking is a fundamental aspect of human communication and can be described as the ability to take turns, project upcoming turn shifts, and supply backchannels at appropriate locations throughout a conversation. In this work, we investigate the role of prosody in turn-taking using the recently proposed Voice Activity Projection model, which incrementally models the upcoming speech activity of the interlocutors in a self-supervised manner, without relying on explicit annotation of turn-taking events, or the explicit modeling of prosodic features. Through manipulation of the speech signal, we investigate how these models implicitly utilize prosodic information. We show that these systems learn to utilize various prosodic aspects of speech both on aggregate quantitative metrics of long-form conversations and on single utterances specifically designed to depend on prosody.

2021

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How “open” are the conversations with open-domain chatbots? A proposal for Speech Event based evaluation
A. Seza Doğruöz | Gabriel Skantze
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

Open-domain chatbots are supposed to converse freely with humans without being restricted to a topic, task or domain. However, the boundaries and/or contents of open-domain conversations are not clear. To clarify the boundaries of “openness”, we conduct two studies: First, we classify the types of “speech events” encountered in a chatbot evaluation data set (i.e., Meena by Google) and find that these conversations mainly cover the “small talk” category and exclude the other speech event categories encountered in real life human-human communication. Second, we conduct a small-scale pilot study to generate online conversations covering a wider range of speech event categories between two humans vs. a human and a state-of-the-art chatbot (i.e., Blender by Facebook). A human evaluation of these generated conversations indicates a preference for human-human conversations, since the human-chatbot conversations lack coherence in most speech event categories. Based on these results, we suggest (a) using the term “small talk” instead of “open-domain” for the current chatbots which are not that “open” in terms of conversational abilities yet, and (b) revising the evaluation methods to test the chatbot conversations against other speech events.

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Projection of Turn Completion in Incremental Spoken Dialogue Systems
Erik Ekstedt | Gabriel Skantze
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

The ability to take turns in a fluent way (i.e., without long response delays or frequent interruptions) is a fundamental aspect of any spoken dialog system. However, practical speech recognition services typically induce a long response delay, as it takes time before the processing of the user’s utterance is complete. There is a considerable amount of research indicating that humans achieve fast response times by projecting what the interlocutor will say and estimating upcoming turn completions. In this work, we implement this mechanism in an incremental spoken dialog system, by using a language model that generates possible futures to project upcoming completion points. In theory, this could make the system more responsive, while still having access to semantic information not yet processed by the speech recognizer. We conduct a small study which indicates that this is a viable approach for practical dialog systems, and that this is a promising direction for future research.

2020

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TurnGPT: a Transformer-based Language Model for Predicting Turn-taking in Spoken Dialog
Erik Ekstedt | Gabriel Skantze
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Syntactic and pragmatic completeness is known to be important for turn-taking prediction, but so far machine learning models of turn-taking have used such linguistic information in a limited way. In this paper, we introduce TurnGPT, a transformer-based language model for predicting turn-shifts in spoken dialog. The model has been trained and evaluated on a variety of written and spoken dialog datasets. We show that the model outperforms two baselines used in prior work. We also report on an ablation study, as well as attention and gradient analyses, which show that the model is able to utilize the dialog context and pragmatic completeness for turn-taking prediction. Finally, we explore the model’s potential in not only detecting, but also projecting, turn-completions.

2019

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Proceedings of the 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue
Satoshi Nakamura | Milica Gasic | Ingrid Zukerman | Gabriel Skantze | Mikio Nakano | Alexandros Papangelis | Stefan Ultes | Koichiro Yoshino
Proceedings of the 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

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Modelling Adaptive Presentations in Human-Robot Interaction using Behaviour Trees
Nils Axelsson | Gabriel Skantze
Proceedings of the 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

In dialogue, speakers continuously adapt their speech to accommodate the listener, based on the feedback they receive. In this paper, we explore the modelling of such behaviours in the context of a robot presenting a painting. A Behaviour Tree is used to organise the behaviour on different levels, and allow the robot to adapt its behaviour in real-time; the tree organises engagement, joint attention, turn-taking, feedback and incremental speech processing. An initial implementation of the model is presented, and the system is evaluated in a user study, where the adaptive robot presenter is compared to a non-adaptive version. The adaptive version is found to be more engaging by the users, although no effects are found on the retention of the presented material.

2018

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A Multimodal Corpus for Mutual Gaze and Joint Attention in Multiparty Situated Interaction
Dimosthenis Kontogiorgos | Vanya Avramova | Simon Alexanderson | Patrik Jonell | Catharine Oertel | Jonas Beskow | Gabriel Skantze | Joakim Gustafson
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

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KTH Tangrams: A Dataset for Research on Alignment and Conceptual Pacts in Task-Oriented Dialogue
Todd Shore | Theofronia Androulakaki | Gabriel Skantze
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

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Using Lexical Alignment and Referring Ability to Address Data Sparsity in Situated Dialog Reference Resolution
Todd Shore | Gabriel Skantze
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Referring to entities in situated dialog is a collaborative process, whereby interlocutors often expand, repair and/or replace referring expressions in an iterative process, converging on conceptual pacts of referring language use in doing so. Nevertheless, much work on exophoric reference resolution (i.e. resolution of references to entities outside of a given text) follows a literary model, whereby individual referring expressions are interpreted as unique identifiers of their referents given the state of the dialog the referring expression is initiated. In this paper, we address this collaborative nature to improve dialogic reference resolution in two ways: First, we trained a words-as-classifiers logistic regression model of word semantics and incrementally adapt the model to idiosyncratic language between dyad partners during evaluation of the dialog. We then used these semantic models to learn the general referring ability of each word, which is independent of referent features. These methods facilitate accurate automatic reference resolution in situated dialog without annotation of referring expressions, even with little background data.

2017

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Towards a General, Continuous Model of Turn-taking in Spoken Dialogue using LSTM Recurrent Neural Networks
Gabriel Skantze
Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

Previous models of turn-taking have mostly been trained for specific turn-taking decisions, such as discriminating between turn shifts and turn retention in pauses. In this paper, we present a predictive, continuous model of turn-taking using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN). The model is trained on human-human dialogue data to predict upcoming speech activity in a future time window. We show how this general model can be applied to two different tasks that it was not specifically trained for. First, to predict whether a turn-shift will occur or not in pauses, where the model achieves a better performance than human observers, and better than results achieved with more traditional models. Second, to make a prediction at speech onset whether the utterance will be a short backchannel or a longer utterance. Finally, we show how the hidden layer in the network can be used as a feature vector for turn-taking decisions in a human-robot interaction scenario.

2015

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Proceedings of the 16th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Alexander Koller | Gabriel Skantze | Filip Jurcicek | Masahiro Araki | Carolyn Penstein Rose
Proceedings of the 16th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

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Modelling situated human-robot interaction using IrisTK
Gabriel Skantze | Martin Johansson
Proceedings of the 16th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

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Opportunities and Obligations to Take Turns in Collaborative Multi-Party Human-Robot Interaction
Martin Johansson | Gabriel Skantze
Proceedings of the 16th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

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Automatic Detection of Miscommunication in Spoken Dialogue Systems
Raveesh Meena | José Lopes | Gabriel Skantze | Joakim Gustafson
Proceedings of the 16th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

2014

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Crowdsourcing Street-level Geographic Information Using a Spoken Dialogue System
Raveesh Meena | Johan Boye | Gabriel Skantze | Joakim Gustafson
Proceedings of the 15th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue (SIGDIAL)

2013

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Human Evaluation of Conceptual Route Graphs for Interpreting Spoken Route Descriptions
Raveesh Meena | Gabriel Skantze | Joakim Gustafson
Proceedings of the IWCS 2013 Workshop on Computational Models of Spatial Language Interpretation and Generation (CoSLI-3)

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Exploring the effects of gaze and pauses in situated human-robot interaction
Gabriel Skantze | Anna Hjalmarsson | Catharine Oertel
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2013 Conference

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The Map Task Dialogue System: A Test-bed for Modelling Human-Like Dialogue
Raveesh Meena | Gabriel Skantze | Joakim Gustafson
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2013 Conference

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A Data-driven Model for Timing Feedback in a Map Task Dialogue System
Raveesh Meena | Gabriel Skantze | Joakim Gustafson
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2013 Conference

2010

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Towards Incremental Speech Generation in Dialogue Systems
Gabriel Skantze | Anna Hjalmarsson
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2010 Conference

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Middleware for Incremental Processing in Conversational Agents
David Schlangen | Timo Baumann | Hendrik Buschmeier | Okko Buß | Stefan Kopp | Gabriel Skantze | Ramin Yaghoubzadeh
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2010 Conference

2009

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Attention and Interaction Control in a Human-Human-Computer Dialogue Setting
Gabriel Skantze | Joakim Gustafson
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2009 Conference

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A General, Abstract Model of Incremental Dialogue Processing
David Schlangen | Gabriel Skantze
Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the ACL (EACL 2009)

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Incremental Dialogue Processing in a Micro-Domain
Gabriel Skantze | David Schlangen
Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the ACL (EACL 2009)

2007

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Making Grounding Decisions: Data-driven Estimation of Dialogue Costs and Confidence Thresholds
Gabriel Skantze
Proceedings of the 8th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue

2005

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GALATEA: A Discourse Modeller Supporting Concept-Level Error Handling in Spoken Dialogue Systems
Gabriel Skantze
Proceedings of the 6th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue