Parliamentary and legislative debate transcripts provide informative insight into elected politicians' opinions, positions, and policy preferences. They are interesting for political and social sciences as well as linguistics and natural language processing (NLP) research. While existing research studied individual parliaments, we apply advanced NLP methods to a joint and comparative analysis of six national parliaments (Bulgarian, Czech, French, Slovene, Spanish, and United Kingdom) between 2017 and 2020. We analyze emotions and sentiment in the transcripts from the ParlaMint dataset collection and assess if the age, gender, and political orientation of speakers can be detected from their speeches. The results show some commonalities and many surprising differences among the analyzed countries.

Sentiment analysis is a well-known natural language processing task that involves identifying the emotional tone or polarity of a given piece of text. With the growth of social media and other online platforms, sentiment analysis has become increasingly crucial for businesses and organizations seeking to monitor and comprehend customer feedback as well as opinions. Supervised learning algorithms have been popularly employed for this task, but they require human-annotated text to create the classifier. To overcome this challenge, lexicon-based tools have been used. A drawback of lexicon-based algorithms is their reliance on pre-defined sentiment lexicons, which may not capture the full range of sentiments in natural language. ChatGPT is a new product of OpenAI and has emerged as the most popular AI product. It can answer questions on various topics and tasks. This study explores the use of ChatGPT as a tool for data labeling for different sentiment analysis tasks. It is evaluated on two distinct sentiment analysis datasets with varying purposes. The results demonstrate that ChatGPT outperforms other lexicon-based unsupervised methods with significant improvements in overall accuracy. Specifically, compared to the best-performing lexical-based algorithms, ChatGPT achieves a remarkable increase in accuracy of 20% for the tweets dataset and approximately 25% for the Amazon reviews dataset. These findings highlight the exceptional performance of ChatGPT in sentiment analysis tasks, surpassing existing lexicon-based approaches by a significant margin. The evidence suggests it can be used for annotation on different sentiment analysis events and taskss.

Hedges play an important role in the management of conversational interaction. In peer tutoring, they are notably used by tutors in dyads (pairs of interlocutors) experiencing low rapport to tone down the impact of instructions and negative feedback. Pursuing the objective of building a tutoring agent that manages rapport with students in order to improve learning, we used a multimodal peer-tutoring dataset to construct a computational framework for identifying hedges. We compared approaches relying on pre-trained resources with others that integrate insights from the social science literature. Our best performance involved a hybrid approach that outperforms the existing baseline while being easier to interpret. We employ a model explainability tool to explore the features that characterize hedges in peer-tutoring conversations, and we identify some novel features, and the benefits of such a hybrid model approach.

Discourse analysis is an important task because it models intrinsic semantic structures between sentences in a document. Discourse markers are natural representations of discourse in our daily language. One challenge is that the markers as well as pre-defined and human-labeled discourse relations can be ambiguous when describing the semantics between sentences. We believe that a better approach is to use a contextual-dependent distribution over the markers to express discourse information. In this work, we propose to learn a Distributed Marker Representation (DMR) by utilizing the (potentially) unlimited discourse marker data with a latent discourse sense, thereby bridging markers with sentence pairs. Such representations can be learned automatically from data without supervision, and in turn provide insights into the data itself. Experiments show the SOTA performance of our DMR on the implicit discourse relation recognition task and strong interpretability. Our method also offers a valuable tool to understand complex ambiguity and entanglement among discourse markers and manually defined discourse relations.

Open-domain long-term memory conversation can establish long-term intimacy with humans, and the key is the ability to understand and memorize long-term dialogue history information. Existing works integrate multiple models for modelling through a pipeline, which ignores the coupling between different stages. In this paper, we propose a Unified framework for Long-term Memory Conversations (UniMC), which increases the connection between different stages by learning relevance representation. Specifically, we decompose the main task into three subtasks based on probability graphs: 1) conversation summarization, 2) memory retrieval, 3) memory-augmented generation. Each subtask involves learning a representation for calculating the relevance between the query and memory, which is modelled by inserting a special token at the beginning of the decoder input. The relevance representation learning strengthens the connection across subtasks through parameter sharing and joint training. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method consistently improves over strong baselines and yields better dialogue consistency and engagingness.

HAIT requires close coordination between humans and AI teammates to work together towards a common goal [40]. Effective communication, prediction of teammates' actions, and high-level coordination are essential components of this collaborative effort. In this regard, the proactive behavior of AI-based systems and the communication thereof during collaboration is an important research topic concerning HAITs, e.g., see Horvitz et al. [8]. Proactivity can be defined as an AI's self-initiating, anticipatory behavior for contributing to effective and efficient task completion. It has been shown to be essential for human teamwork as it leads to higher job and team performance and is associated with leadership and innovation [3]. However, the design of adequate proactivity for AI-based systems to support humans is still an open question and a challenging topic. It is essential to study the impact of proactive system actions on the human-agent trust relationship and how to use information about an AI agent's perceived trustworthiness to model appropriate proactive dialog strategies for forming effective HAITs.

Dialogue state tracking (DST) aims to convert the dialogue history into dialogue states which consist of slot-value pairs. As condensed structural information memorizing all history information, the dialogue state in the last turn is typically adopted as the input for predicting the current state by DST models. However, these models tend to keep the predicted slot values unchanged, which is defined as state momentum in this paper. Specifically, the models struggle to update slot values that need to be changed and correct wrongly predicted slot values in the last turn. To this end, we propose MoNET to tackle state momentum via noise-enhanced training. First, the previous state of each turn in the training data is noised via replacing some of its slot values. Then, the noised previous state is used as the input to learn to predict the current state, improving the model's ability to update and correct slot values. Furthermore, a contrastive context matching framework is designed to narrow the representation distance between a state and its corresponding noised variant, which reduces the impact of noised state and makes the model better understand the dialogue history. Experimental results on MultiWOZ datasets show that MoNET outperforms previous DST methods. Ablations and analysis verify the effectiveness of MoNET in alleviating state momentum and improving anti-noise ability.

In schema-guided dialogue state tracking models estimate the current state of a conversation using natural language descriptions of the service schema for generalization to unseen services. Prior generative approaches which decode slot values sequentially do not generalize well to variations in schema, while discriminative approaches separately encode history and schema and fail to account for inter-slot and intent-slot dependencies. We introduce SPLAT, a novel architecture which achieves better generalization and efficiency than prior approaches by constraining outputs to a limited prediction space. At the same time, our model allows for rich attention among descriptions and history while keeping computation costs constrained by incorporating linear-time attention. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on the Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) and MultiWOZ datasets. Our approach significantly improves upon existing models achieving 85.3 JGA on the SGD dataset. Further, we show increased robustness on the SGD-X benchmark: our model outperforms the more than 30$\times$ larger D3ST-XXL model by 5.0 points.

Extracting sentiment elements using pre-trained generative models has recently led to large improvements in aspect-based sentiment analysis benchmarks. However, these models always need large-scale computing resources, and they also ignore explicit modeling of structure between sentiment elements. To address these challenges, we propose an opinion tree parsing model, aiming to parse all the sentiment elements from an opinion tree, which is much faster, and can explicitly reveal a more comprehensive and complete aspect-level sentiment structure. In particular, we first introduce a novel context-free opinion grammar to normalize the opinion tree structure. We then employ a neural chart-based opinion tree parser to fully explore the correlations among sentiment elements and parse them into an opinion tree structure. Extensive experiments show the superiority of our proposed model and the capacity of the opinion tree parser with the proposed context-free opinion grammar. More importantly, the results also prove that our model is much faster than previous models.

Lack of available resources such as text corpora for low-resource languages seriously hinders research on natural language processing and computational linguistics. This paper presents AlbMoRe, a corpus of 800 sentiment annotated movie reviews in Albanian. Each text is labeled as positive or negative and can be used for sentiment analysis research. Preliminary results based on traditional machine learning classifiers trained with the AlbMoRe samples are also reported. They can serve as comparison baselines for future research experiments.