We propose a framework for online multimodal dialog act (DA) classification based on raw audio and ASR-generated transcriptions of current and past utterances. Existing multimodal DA classification approaches are limited by ineffective audio modeling and late-stage fusion. We showcase significant improvements in multimodal DA classification by integrating modalities at a more granular level and incorporating recent advancements in large language and audio models for audio feature extraction. We further investigate the effectiveness of self-attention and cross-attention mechanisms in modeling utterances and dialogs for DA classification. We achieve a substantial increase of 3 percentage points in the F1 score relative to current state-of-the-art models on two prominent DA classification datasets, MRDA and EMOTyDA.

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.

Natural language (as opposed to structured communication modes such as Morse code) is by far the most common mode of communication between humans, and can thus provide significant insight into both individual mental states and interpersonal dynamics. As part of DARPA’s Artificial Social Intelligence for Successful Teams (ASIST) program, we are developing an AI agent team member that constructs and maintains models of their human teammates and provides appropriate task-relevant advice to improve team processes and mission performance. One of the key components of this agent is a module that uses a rule-based approach to extract task-relevant events from natural language utterances in real time, and publish them for consumption by downstream components. In this case study, we evaluate the performance of our rule-based event extraction system on a recently conducted ASIST experiment consisting of a simulated urban search and rescue mission in Minecraft. We compare the performance of our approach with that of a zero-shot neural classifier, and find that our approach outperforms the classifier for all event types, even when the classifier is used in an oracle setting where it knows how many events should be extracted from each utterance.

Extending machine reading approaches to extract mathematical concepts and their descriptions is useful for a variety of tasks, ranging from mathematical information retrieval to increasing accessibility of scientific documents for the visually impaired. This entails segmenting mathematical formulae into identifiers and linking them to their natural language descriptions. We propose a rule-based approach for this task, which extracts LaTeX representations of formula identifiers and links them to their in-text descriptions, given only the original PDF and the location of the formula of interest. We also present a novel evaluation dataset for this task, as well as the tool used to create it.

Building causal models of complicated phenomena such as food insecurity is currently a slow and labor-intensive manual process. In this paper, we introduce an approach that builds executable probabilistic models from raw, free text. The proposed approach is implemented through three systems: Eidos, INDRA, and Delphi. Eidos is an open-domain machine reading system designed to extract causal relations from natural language. It is rule-based, allowing for rapid domain transfer, customizability, and interpretability. INDRA aggregates multiple sources of causal information and performs assembly to create a coherent knowledge base and assess its reliability. This assembled knowledge serves as the starting point for modeling. Delphi is a modeling framework that assembles quantified causal fragments and their contexts into executable probabilistic models that respect the semantics of the original text, and can be used to support decision making.