Recent advancements in NLP, largely driven by Large Language Models (LLMs), have significantly improved performance on an array of tasks. However, Dialogue Act (DA) classification remains challenging, particularly in the fine-grained 50-class, multiparty setting. This paper investigates the root causes of LLMs’ poor performance in DA classification through a linguistically motivated analysis. We identify three key pre-tasks essential for accurate DA prediction: Turn Management, Communicative Function Identification, and Dialogue Structure Prediction. Our experiments reveal that LLMs struggle with these fundamental tasks, often failing to outperform simple rule-based baselines. Additionally, we establish a strong empirical correlation between errors in these pre-tasks and DA classification failures. A human study further highlights the significant gap between LLM and human-level dialogue understanding. These findings indicate that LLMs’ shortcomings in dialogue comprehension hinder their ability to accurately predict DAs, highlighting the need for improved dialogue-aware training approaches.

Automating benefit verification phone calls saves time in healthcare and helps patients receive treatment faster. It is critical to obtain highly accurate information in these phone calls, as it can affect a patient’s healthcare journey. Given the noise in phone call transcripts, we have a two-stage system that involves a post-call review phase for potentially noisy fields, where human reviewers manually verify the extracted data—a labor-intensive task. To automate this stage, we introduce Auto Review, which significantly reduces manual effort while maintaining a high bar for accuracy. This system, being highly reliant on call transcripts, suffers a performance bottleneck due to automatic speech recognition (ASR) issues. This problem is further exacerbated by the use of domain-specific jargon in the calls. In this work, we propose a second-stage postprocessing pipeline for accurate information extraction. We improve accuracy by using multiple ASR alternatives and a pseudo-labeling approach that does not require manually corrected transcripts. Experiments with general-purpose large language models and feature-based model pipelines demonstrate substantial improvements in the quality of corrected call transcripts, thereby enhancing the efficiency of Auto Review.

Successful teamwork requires team members to understand each other and communicate effectively, managing multiple linguistic and paralinguistic tasks at once. Because of the potential for interrelatedness of these tasks, it is important to have the ability to make multiple types of predictions on the same dataset. Here, we introduce Multimodal Communication Annotations for Teams (MultiCAT), a speech- and text-based dataset consisting of audio recordings, automated and hand-corrected transcriptions. MultiCAT builds upon data from teams working collaboratively to save victims in a simulated search and rescue mission, and consists of annotations and benchmark results for the following tasks: (1) dialog act classification, (2) adjacency pair detection, (3) sentiment and emotion recognition, (4) closed-loop communication detection, and (5) vocal (phonetic) entrainment detection. We also present exploratory analyses on the relationship between our annotations and team outcomes. We posit that additional work on these tasks and their intersection will further improve understanding of team communication and its relation to team performance. Code & data: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14834835

Most previous research on moral frames has focused on social media short texts, little work has explored moral sentiment within news articles. In news articles, authors often express their opinions or political stance through moral judgment towards events, specifically whether the event is right or wrong according to social moral rules. This paper initiates a new task to understand moral opinions towards events in news articles. We have created a new dataset, EMONA, and annotated event-level moral opinions in news articles. This dataset consists of 400 news articles containing over 10k sentences and 45k events, among which 9,613 events received moral foundation labels. Extracting event morality is a challenging task, as moral judgment towards events can be very implicit. Baseline models were built for event moral identification and classification. In addition, we also conduct extrinsic evaluations to integrate event-level moral opinions into three downstream tasks. The statistical analysis and experiments show that moral opinions of events can serve as informative features for identifying ideological bias or subjective events.

Utterances do not occur in isolation in dialogues; it is essential to have the information of who the speaker of an utterance is to be able to recover the speaker’s intention with respect to the surrounding context. Beyond simply capturing speaker switches, identifying how speakers interact with each other in a dialogue is crucial to understanding conversational flow. This becomes increasingly important and simultaneously difficult to model when more than two interlocutors take part in a conversation. To overcome this challenge, we propose to explicitly add speaker awareness to each utterance representation. To that end, we use a graph neural network to model how each speaker is behaving within the local context of a conversation. The speaker representations learned this way are then used to update their respective utterance representations. We experiment with both multiparticipant and dyadic conversations on the MRDA and SwDA datasets and show the effectiveness of our approach.