The CogSci Speaker Series will be Wednesdays at 12pm in Carnegie 113

10/11: Abraham Sanders
Title: Toward Natural, Fluid Conversation with Spoken Dialogue Agents
Abstract: Conversational agents are becoming increasingly widespread with use in customer support, question answering, and many other applications. A subset of these agents are spoken dialogue systems that interact with humans via natural speech. However, most existing spoken dialogue systems use rigid, half-duplex interaction mechanisms with fixed turn-taking rules. This does not reflect the dynamic nature of human-to-human dialogue in which there exist interruptions, pauses, back-channel acknowledgements (e.g., "yeah, mhm"), simultaneous speech, and non-verbal acts such as laughter. We discuss attempts at emulating these dynamics in spoken dialogue systems that can support interactions close to live face-to-face or over-the-phone conversations between humans, including our own ongoing work to this end.

10/18: Sounak Banerjee

10/25: Grace Riesling

11/1: Neha Upadhya

11/8: Adan Gomez

11/15: Omar Cobas

11/29: Sasha Lutsevich

12/6: Chris Arndt