The processing of long sequences with models remains a subject in its own right, including automatic summary, despite recent improvements. In this work, we present experiments on the automatic summarization of scientific articles using BART models, taking into account textual information coming from distinct passages from the long texts to be summarized. We demonstrate that taking into account document structure improves the performance of state-of-the-art models and approaches the performance of LongFormer on English.

Engagement is an important feature in human-human and human-agent interaction. In this paper, we investigate lexical alignment as a cue of engagement, relying on two different corpora : CID and SEMAINE. Our final goal is to build a virtual conversational character that could use alignment strategies to maintain user’s engagement. To do so, we investigate two alignment processes : shared vocabulary and other-repetitions. A quantitative and qualitative approach is proposed to characterize these aspects in human-human (CID) and human-operator (SEMAINE) interactions. Our results show that these processes are observable in both corpora, indicating a stable pattern that can be further modelled in conversational agents.