As machine learning becomes more widespread and is used in more critical applications, it's important to provide explanations for these models, to prevent unintended behavior. Unfortunately, many current interpretability methods struggle with faithfulness. Therefore, this Ph.D. thesis investigates the question "How to provide and ensure faithful explanations for complex general-purpose neural NLP models?" The main thesis is that we should develop new paradigms in interpretability. This is achieved by first developing solid faithfulness metrics and then applying the lessons learned from this investigation to develop new paradigms. The two new paradigms explored are faithfulness measurable models (FMMs) and self-explanations. The idea in self-explanations is to have large language models explain themselves, we identify that current models are not capable of doing this consistently. However, we suggest how this could be achieved. The idea of FMMs is to create models that are designed such that measuring faithfulness is cheap and precise. This makes it possible to optimize an explanation towards maximum faithfulness, which makes FMMs designed to be explained. We find that FMMs yield explanations that are near theoretical optimal in terms of faithfulness. Overall, from all investigations of faithfulness, results show that post-hoc and intrinsic explanations are by default model and task-dependent. However, this was not the case when using FMMs, even with the same post-hoc explanation methods. This shows, that even simple modifications to the model, such as randomly masking the training dataset, as was done in FMMs, can drastically change the situation and result in consistently faithful explanations. This answers the question of how to provide and ensure faithful explanations.

Recent advancements in spoken dialogue models, exemplified by systems like GPT-4o, have captured significant attention in the speech domain. Compared to traditional three-tier cascaded spoken dialogue models that comprise speech recognition (ASR), large language models (LLMs), and text-to-speech (TTS), modern spoken dialogue models exhibit greater intelligence. These advanced spoken dialogue models not only comprehend audio, music, and other speech-related features, but also capture stylistic and timbral characteristics in speech. Moreover, they generate high-quality, multi-turn speech responses with low latency, enabling real-time interaction through simultaneous listening and speaking capability. Despite the progress in spoken dialogue systems, there is a lack of comprehensive surveys that systematically organize and analyze these systems and the underlying technologies. To address this, we have first compiled existing spoken dialogue systems in the chronological order and categorized them into the cascaded and end-to-end paradigms. We then provide an in-depth overview of the core technologies in spoken dialogue models, covering aspects such as speech representation, training paradigm, streaming, duplex, and interaction capabilities. Each section discusses the limitations of these technologies and outlines considerations for future research. Additionally, we present a thorough review of relevant datasets, evaluation metrics, and benchmarks from the perspectives of training and evaluating spoken dialogue systems. We hope this survey will contribute to advancing both academic research and industrial applications in the field of spoken dialogue systems. The related material is available at https://github.com/jishengpeng/WavChat.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown remarkable progress in high-level semantic tasks such as visual question answering, image captioning, and emotion recognition. However, despite advancements, there remains a lack of standardized benchmarks for evaluating MLLMs performance in multi-object sentiment analysis, a key task in semantic understanding. To address this gap, we introduce MOSABench, a novel evaluation dataset designed specifically for multi-object sentiment analysis. MOSABench includes approximately 1,000 images with multiple objects, requiring MLLMs to independently assess the sentiment of each object, thereby reflecting real-world complexities. Key innovations in MOSABench include distance-based target annotation, post-processing for evaluation to standardize outputs, and an improved scoring mechanism. Our experiments reveal notable limitations in current MLLMs: while some models, like mPLUG-owl and Qwen-VL2, demonstrate effective attention to sentiment-relevant features, others exhibit scattered focus and performance declines, especially as the spatial distance between objects increases. This research underscores the need for MLLMs to enhance accuracy in complex, multi-object sentiment analysis tasks and establishes MOSABench as a foundational tool for advancing sentiment analysis capabilities in MLLMs.

Task-oriented Dialog (ToD) systems have to solve multiple subgoals to accomplish user goals, whereas feedback is often obtained only at the end of the dialog. In this work, we propose SUIT (SUbgoal-aware ITerative Training), an iterative training approach for improving ToD systems. We sample dialogs from the model we aim to improve and determine subgoals that contribute to dialog success using distant supervision to obtain high quality training samples. We show how this data improves supervised fine-tuning or, alternatively, preference learning results. SUIT is able to iteratively generate more data instead of relying on fixed static sets. SUIT reaches new state-of-the-art performance on a popular ToD benchmark.

Linear Text Segmentation is the task of automatically tagging text documents with topic shifts, i.e. the places in the text where the topics change. A well-established area of research in Natural Language Processing, drawing from well-understood concepts in linguistic and computational linguistic research, the field has recently seen a lot of interest as a result of the surge of text, video, and audio available on the web, which in turn require ways of summarising and categorizing the mole of content for which linear text segmentation is a fundamental step. In this survey, we provide an extensive overview of current advances in linear text segmentation, describing the state of the art in terms of resources and approaches for the task. Finally, we highlight the limitations of available resources and of the task itself, while indicating ways forward based on the most recent literature and under-explored research directions.

In order to solve the problem of insufficient generation quality caused by traditional patent text abstract generation models only originating from patent specifications, the problem of new terminology OOV caused by rapid patent updates, and the problem of information redundancy caused by insufficient consideration of the high professionalism, accuracy, and uniqueness of patent texts, we proposes a patent text abstract generation model (MSEA) based on a master-slave encoder architecture; Firstly, the MSEA model designs a master-slave encoder, which combines the instructions in the patent text with the claims as input, and fully explores the characteristics and details between the two through the master-slave encoder; Then, the model enhances the consideration of new technical terms in the input sequence based on the pointer network, and further enhances the correlation with the input text by re weighing the "remembered" and "for-gotten" parts of the input sequence from the encoder; Finally, an enhanced repetition suppression mechanism for patent text was introduced to ensure accurate and non redundant abstracts generated. On a publicly available patent text dataset, compared to the state-of-the-art model, Improved Multi-Head Attention Mechanism (IMHAM), the MSEA model achieves an improvement of 0.006, 0.005, and 0.005 in Rouge-1, Rouge-2, and Rouge-L scores, respectively. MSEA leverages the characteristics of patent texts to effectively enhance the quality of patent text generation, demonstrating its advancement and effectiveness in the experiments.

We propose an Economic Lexicon (EL) specifically designed for textual applications in economics. We construct the dictionary with two important characteristics: 1) to have a wide coverage of terms used in documents discussing economic concepts, and 2) to provide a human-annotated sentiment score in the range [-1,1]. We illustrate the use of the EL in the context of a simple sentiment measure and consider several applications in economics. The comparison to other lexicons shows that the EL is superior due to its wider coverage of domain relevant terms and its more accurate categorization of the word sentiment.

In this paper, we describe the development of symbolic representations annotated on human-robot dialogue data to make dimensions of meaning accessible to autonomous systems participating in collaborative, natural language dialogue, and to enable common ground with human partners. A particular challenge for establishing common ground arises in remote dialogue (occurring in disaster relief or search-and-rescue tasks), where a human and robot are engaged in a joint navigation and exploration task of an unfamiliar environment, but where the robot cannot immediately share high quality visual information due to limited communication constraints. Engaging in a dialogue provides an effective way to communicate, while on-demand or lower-quality visual information can be supplemented for establishing common ground. Within this paradigm, we capture propositional semantics and the illocutionary force of a single utterance within the dialogue through our Dialogue-AMR annotation, an augmentation of Abstract Meaning Representation. We then capture patterns in how different utterances within and across speaker floors relate to one another in our development of a multi-floor Dialogue Structure annotation schema. Finally, we begin to annotate and analyze the ways in which the visual modalities provide contextual information to the dialogue for overcoming disparities in the collaborators' understanding of the environment. We conclude by discussing the use-cases, architectures, and systems we have implemented from our annotations that enable physical robots to autonomously engage with humans in bi-directional dialogue and navigation.

If you struggle to hear what's being said in the movies and shows you're watching, just know you're not alone. Whether your hearing is less than ideal, or the sound mixing could be better, or you're trying to watch and listen to something without disturbing the rest of the household, there are a lot of reasons why dialog might be hard to pick out. The good news is that there are quite a few ways to fix the problem so you don't have to put up with missing out on dialog, which is a crucial part of understanding and enjoying what's onscreen. These are the options you can try, depending on the devices and apps you're using for streaming. Your first port of call should be the apps you're using to watch whatever it is you're watching.

Podcasts provide highly diverse content to a massive listener base through a unique on-demand modality. However, limited data has prevented large-scale computational analysis of the podcast ecosystem. To fill this gap, we introduce a massive dataset of over 1.1M podcast transcripts that is largely comprehensive of all English language podcasts available through public RSS feeds from May and June of 2020. This data is not limited to text, but rather includes audio features and speaker turns for a subset of 370K episodes, and speaker role inferences and other metadata for all 1.1M episodes. Using this data, we also conduct a foundational investigation into the content, structure, and responsiveness of this ecosystem. Together, our data and analyses open the door to continued computational research of this popular and impactful medium.