When individuals engage in spoken discourse, various phenomena can be observed that differ from those that are apparent in text-based conversation. While written communication commonly uses a question mark to denote a query, in spoken discourse, queries are frequently indicated by a rising intonation at the end of a sentence. However, numerous speech recognition engines do not append a question mark to recognized queries, presenting a challenge when creating a spoken dialogue system. Specifically, the absence of a question mark at the end of a sentence can impede the generation of appropriate responses to queries in spoken dialogue systems. Hence, we investigate the impact of question marks on dialogue systems, with the results showing that they have a significant impact. Moreover, we analyze specific examples in an effort to determine which types of utterances have the impact on dialogue systems.

Pretrained language models require the use of consistent segmentation (e.g., subword- or character-level segmentation) in pretraining and finetuning. In NLP, many tasks are modeled by subword-level segmentation better than by character-level segmentation. However, because of their format, several tasks require the use of character-level segmentation. Thus, in order to tackle both types of NLP tasks, language models must be independently pretrained for both subword and character-level segmentation. However, this is an inefficient and costly procedure. Instead, this paper proposes a method for training a language model with unified segmentation. This means that the trained model can be finetuned on both subword- and character-level segmentation. The principle of the method is to apply the subword regularization technique to generate a mixture of subword- and character-level segmentation. Through experiment on BERT models, we demonstrate that our method can halve the computational cost of pretraining.

With the ambition to create avatars capable of human-level casual conversation, we developed an open-domain avatar chatbot, situated in a virtual reality environment, that employs a large language model (LLM). Introducing the LLM posed several challenges for multimodal integration, such as developing techniques to align diverse outputs and avatar control, as well as addressing the issue of slow generation speed. To address these challenges, we integrated various external modules into our system. Our system is based on the award-winning model from the Dialogue System Live Competition 5. Through this work, we hope to stimulate discussions within the research community about the potential and challenges of multimodal dialogue systems enhanced with LLMs.

Dialogue systems without consistent responses are not attractive. In this study, we build a dialogue system that can respond based on a given character setting (persona) to bring consistency. Considering the trend of the rapidly increasing scale of language models, we propose an approach that uses prompt-tuning, which has low learning costs, on pre-trained large-scale language models. The results of the automatic and manual evaluations in English and Japanese show that it is possible to build a dialogue system with more natural and personalized responses with less computational resources than fine-tuning.