This paper investigates the enhancement of Dialogue Systems by integrating the creative capabilities of Large Language Models. While traditional Dialogue Systems focus on understanding user input and selecting appropriate system actions, Language Models excel at generating natural language text based on prompts. Therefore, we propose to improve controllability and coherence of interactions by guiding a Language Model with control signals that enable explicit control over the system behaviour. To address this, we tested and evaluated our concept in 815 conversations with over 3600 dialogue exchanges on a dataset. Our experiment examined the quality of generated system responses using two strategies: An unguided strategy where task data was provided to the models, and a controlled strategy in which a simulated Dialogue Controller provided appropriate system actions. The results show that the average BLEU score and the classification of dialogue acts improved in the controlled Natural Language Generation.

My research interests include multi-user dialogue systems with a focus on user modelling and the development of moderation strategies. Contemporary Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDSs) frequently lack the ability to deal with more than one user simultaneously. Moreover, I am interested in researching on the Controllability of Language Generation using Large Language Models (LLMs). Our hypothesis is that an integration of explicit dialogue control signals improves the Controllability and Reliability of generated sequences independently of the underlying LLM.

Robots will eventually enter our daily lives and assist with a variety of tasks. Especially in the household domain, robots may become indispensable helpers by overtaking tedious tasks, e.g. keeping the place tidy. Their effectiveness and efficiency, however, depend on their ability to adapt to our needs, routines, and personal characteristics. Otherwise, they may not be accepted and trusted in our private domain. For enabling adaptation, the interaction between a human and a robot needs to be personalized. Therefore, the robot needs to collect personal information from the user. However, it is unclear how such sensitive data can be collected in an understandable way without losing a user’s trust in the system. In this paper, we present a conversational approach for explicitly collecting personal user information using natural dialogue. For creating a sound interactive personalization, we have developed an empathy-augmented dialogue strategy. In an online study, the empathy-augmented strategy was compared to a baseline dialogue strategy for interactive personalization. We have found the empathy-augmented strategy to perform notably friendlier. Overall, using dialogue for interactive personalization has generally shown positive user reception.

L’identification des entités nommées dans un texte est une étape fondamentale pour de nombreuses tâches d’extraction d’information. Pour avoir une identification complète, une étape de désambiguïsation des entités similaires doit être réalisée. Celle-ci s’appuie souvent sur la seule description textuelle des entités. Or, les bases de connaissances contiennent des informations plus riches, sous la forme de relations entre les entités : cette information peut également être exploitée pour améliorer la désambiguïsation des entités. Nous proposons dans cet article une approche d’apprentissage de représentations distribuées de ces relations et leur utilisation pour la tâche de désambiguïsation d’entités nommées. Nous montrons le gain de cette méthode sur un corpus d’évaluation standard, en anglais, issu de la tâche de désambiguïsation d’entités de la campagne TAC-KBP.