The Future of Cognitive Strategy-enhanced Persuasive Dialogue Agents: New Perspectives and Trends

Persuasion, as one of the crucial abilities in human communication, has garnered extensive attention from researchers within the field of intelligent dialogue systems. We humans tend to persuade others to change their viewpoints, attitudes or behaviors through conversations in various scenarios (e.g., persuasion for social good, arguing in online platforms). Developing dialogue agents that can persuade others to accept certain standpoints is essential to achieving truly intelligent and anthropomorphic dialogue system. Benefiting from the substantial progress of Large Language Models (LLMs), dialogue agents have acquired an exceptional capability in context understanding and response generation. However, as a typical and complicated cognitive psychological system, persuasive dialogue agents also require knowledge from the domain of cognitive psychology to attain a level of human-like persuasion. Consequently, the cognitive strategy-enhanced persuasive dialogue agent (defined as CogAgent), which incorporates cognitive strategies to achieve persuasive targets through conversation, has become a predominant research paradigm. To depict the research trends of CogAgent, in this paper, we first present several fundamental cognitive psychology theories and give the formalized definition of three typical cognitive strategies, including the persuasion strategy, the topic path planning strategy, and the argument structure prediction strategy. Then we propose a new system architecture by incorporating the formalized definition to lay the foundation of CogAgent. Representative works are detailed and investigated according to the combined cognitive strategy, followed by the summary of authoritative benchmarks and evaluation metrics. Finally, we summarize our insights on open issues and future directions of CogAgent for upcoming researchers.Comment: 36 pages, 6 figure

A Conversation is Worth A Thousand Recommendations: A Survey of Holistic Conversational Recommender Systems

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) generate recommendations through an interactive process. However, not all CRS approaches use human conversations as their source of interaction data; the majority of prior CRS work simulates interactions by exchanging entity-level information. As a result, claims of prior CRS work do not generalise to real-world settings where conversations take unexpected turns, or where conversational and intent understanding is not perfect. To tackle this challenge, the research community has started to examine holistic CRS, which are trained using conversational data collected from real-world scenarios. Despite their emergence, such holistic approaches are under-explored. We present a comprehensive survey of holistic CRS methods by summarizing the literature in a structured manner. Our survey recognises holistic CRS approaches as having three components: 1) a backbone language model, the optional use of 2) external knowledge, and/or 3) external guidance. We also give a detailed analysis of CRS datasets and evaluation methods in real application scenarios. We offer our insight as to the current challenges of holistic CRS and possible future trends.Comment: Accepted by 5th KaRS Workshop @ ACM RecSys 2023, 8 page

Statistical natural language generation for dialogue systems based on hierarchical models

Due to the increasing presence of natural-language interfaces in our life, natural language processing (NLP) is currently gaining more popularity every year. However, until recently, the main part of the research activity in this area was aimed to Natural Language Understanding (NLU), which is responsible for extracting meanings from natural language input. This is explained by a wider number of practical applications of NLU such as machine translation, etc., whereas Natural Language Generation is mainly used for providing output interfaces, which was considered more as a user interface problem rather than a functionality issue. Generally speaking, natural language generation (NLG) is the process of generating text from a semantic representation, which can be expressed in many different forms. The common application of NLG takes part in so called Spoken Dialogue System (SDS), where user interacts directly by voice with a computer- based system to receive information or perform a certain type of actions as, for example, buying a plane ticket or booking a table in a restaurant. Dialogue systems represent one of the most interesting applications within the field of speech technologies. Usually the NLG part in this kind of systems was provided by templates, only filling canned gaps with requested information. But nowadays, since SDS are increasing its complexity, more advanced and user-friendly interfaces should be provided, thereby creating a need for a more refined and adaptive approach. One of the solutions to be considered are the NLG models based on statistical frameworks, where the system’s response to user is generated in real-time, adjusting their response to the user performance, instead of just choosing a pertinent template. Due to the corpus-based approach, these systems are easy to adapt to the different tasks in a range of informational domain. The aim of this work is to present a statistical approach to the problem of utterance generation, which uses cooperation between two different language models (LM) in order to enhance the efficiency of NLG module. In the higher level, a class- based language model is used to build the syntactic structure of the sentence. Inthe second layer, a specific language model acts inside each class, dealing with the words. In the dialogue system described in this work, a user asks for an information regarding to a bus schedule, route schemes, fares and special information. Therefore in each dialogue the user has a specific dialogue goal, which needs to be met by the system. This could be used as one of the methods to measure the system performance, as well as the appropriate utterance generation and average dialogue length, which is important when speaking about an interactive information system. The work is organized as follows. In Section 2 the basic approaches to the NLG task are described, and their advantages and disadvantages are considered. Section 3 presents the objective of this work. In Section 4 the basic model and its novelty is explained. In Section 5 the details of the task features and the corpora employed are presented. Section 6 contains the experiments results and its explanation, as well as the evaluation of the obtained results. The Section 7 resumes the conclusions and the future investigation proposals

Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation

This paper surveys the current state of the art in Natural Language Generation (NLG), defined as the task of generating text or speech from non-linguistic input. A survey of NLG is timely in view of the changes that the field has undergone over the past decade or so, especially in relation to new (usually data-driven) methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey therefore aims to (a) give an up-to-date synthesis of research on the core tasks in NLG and the architectures adopted in which such tasks are organised; (b) highlight a number of relatively recent research topics that have arisen partly as a result of growing synergies between NLG and other areas of artificial intelligence; (c) draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, relating them to similar challenges faced in other areas of Natural Language Processing, with an emphasis on different evaluation methods and the relationships between them.Comment: Published in Journal of AI Research (JAIR), volume 61, pp 75-170. 118 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl

Neural approaches to discourse coherence: modeling, evaluation and application

Discourse coherence is an important aspect of text quality that refers to the way different textual units relate to each other. In this thesis, I investigate neural approaches to modeling discourse coherence. I present a multi-task neural network where the main task is to predict a document-level coherence score and the secondary task is to learn word-level syntactic features. Additionally, I examine the effect of using contextualised word representations in single-task and multi-task setups. I evaluate my models on a synthetic dataset where incoherent documents are created by shuffling the sentence order in coherent original documents. The results show the efficacy of my multi-task learning approach, particularly when enhanced with contextualised embeddings, achieving new state-of-the-art results in ranking the coherent documents higher than the incoherent ones (96.9%). Furthermore, I apply my approach to the realistic domain of people’s everyday writing, such as emails and online posts, and further demonstrate its ability to capture various degrees of coherence. In order to further investigate the linguistic properties captured by coherence models, I create two datasets that exhibit syntactic and semantic alterations. Evaluating different models on these datasets reveals their ability to capture syntactic perturbations but their inadequacy to detect semantic changes. I find that semantic alterations are instead captured by models that first build sentence representations from averaged word embeddings, then apply a set of linear transformations over input sentence pairs. Finally, I present an application for coherence models in the pedagogical domain. I first demonstrate that state of-the-art neural approaches to automated essay scoring (AES) are not robust to adversarially created, grammatical, but incoherent sequences of sentences. Accordingly, I propose a framework for integrating and jointly training a coherence model with a state-of-the-art neural AES system in order to enhance its ability to detect such adversarial input. I show that this joint framework maintains a performance comparable to the state-of-the-art AES system in predicting a holistic essay score while significantly outperforming it in adversarial detection

Moral Intuitions and Organizational Culture

Many efforts to understand and respond to a succession of corporate scandals over the last few years have underscored the importance of organizational culture in shaping the behavior of individuals. This focus reflects appreciation that even if an organization has adopted elaborate rules and policies designed to ensure legal compliance and ethical behavior, those pronouncements will be ineffective if other norms and incentives promote contrary conduct. Responding to the call for creating and sustaining an ethical culture in organizations requires appreciating the subtle ways in which various characteristics of an organization may work in tandem or at cross-purposes in shaping behavior. The idea is to identify the influences likely to be most important, analyze how people are apt to respond to them, and revise them if necessary so that they create the right kinds of incentives when individuals are deciding how to act. This can be a tall order even if we assume that most behavior is the result of a deliberative process that weighs multiple risks and rewards. It’s even more daunting if we accept the notion that conscious deliberation typically plays but a minor role in shaping behavior. A focus on what two scholars describe as “the unbearable automaticity of being” posits that most of a person’s everyday life is determined not by conscious intentions and deliberate choices but by mental processes outside of conscious awareness. In this article, I discuss a particular strand of research that is rooted in the study of non-conscious mental processes, and consider its implications for ethics and culture in the organizational setting. This is work on the process that we use to identify and respond to situations that raise what we think of as distinctly moral questions. A growing body of research suggests that a large portion of this process involves automatic non-conscious cognitive and emotional reactions rather than conscious deliberation. One way to think of these reactions is that they reflect reliance on moral intuitions. When such intuitions arise, we don’t engage in moral reasoning in order to arrive at a conclusion. Instead, we do so in order to justify a conclusion that we’ve already reached. In other words, moral conclusions precede, rather than follow, moral reasoning. If this research accurately captures much of our moral experience, what does it suggest about what’s necessary to foster an ethical organizational culture? At first blush, the implications seem unsettling. The non-conscious realm is commonly associated with irrational and arbitrary impulses, and morality often is characterized as the hard-won achievement of reason over these unruly forces. If most of our moral judgments are the product of non-conscious processes, how can we hope to understand, much less influence, our moral responses? Are moral reactions fundamentally inscrutable and beyond appeals to reason? If reason has no persuasive force, does appreciation of the non-conscious source of our moral judgments suggest that any effort to promote ethical conduct must rest on a crude behaviorism that manipulates penalties and rewards? I believe that acknowledging the prominent role of non-conscious processes in shaping moral responses need not inevitably lead either to fatalism or Skinnerian behaviorism. Research has begun to shed light on how these processes operate. Related work has suggested how our moral responses may be rooted in human evolution. This perspective focuses on the ways in which our capacity for moral judgment is embedded in physical and mental processes that have provided an adaptive advantage in human evolution. These bodies of research contribute to a richer portrait of human cognition and behavior that can be valuable in thinking about how to promote ethical awareness and conduct. As Owen Flanagan has put it, “seeing clearly the kinds of persons we are is a necessary condition for any productive ethical reflection.” If there were such a thing as a normative theory of human movement, it would be futile if it exhorted us to fly. Efforts to create an organizational culture that encouraged people to fly would be doomed as well. In thinking about ethics, we need to have a sense of what lies between simply accommodating what we tend to do and demanding that we fly. My hope is that this article takes a small step in that direction

음악적 요소에 대한 조건부 생성의 개선에 관한 연구: 화음과 표현을 중심으로

학위논문(박사) -- 서울대학교대학원 : 융합과학기술대학원 융합과학부(디지털정보융합전공), 2023. 2. 이교구.Conditional generation of musical components (CGMC) creates a part of music based on partial musical components such as melody or chord. CGMC is beneficial for discovering complex relationships among musical attributes. It can also assist non-experts who face difficulties in making music. However, recent studies for CGMC are still facing two challenges in terms of generation quality and model controllability. First, the structure of the generated music is not robust. Second, only limited ranges of musical factors and tasks have been examined as targets for flexible control of generation. In this thesis, we aim to mitigate these two challenges to improve the CGMC systems. For musical structure, we focus on intuitive modeling of musical hierarchy to help the model explicitly learn musically meaningful dependency. To this end, we utilize alignment paths between the raw music data and the musical units such as notes or chords. For musical creativity, we facilitate smooth control of novel musical attributes using latent representations. We attempt to achieve disentangled representations of the intended factors by regularizing them with data-driven inductive bias. This thesis verifies the proposed approaches particularly in two representative CGMC tasks, melody harmonization and expressive performance rendering. A variety of experimental results show the possibility of the proposed approaches to expand musical creativity under stable generation quality.음악적 요소를 조건부 생성하는 분야인 CGMC는 멜로디나 화음과 같은 음악의 일부분을 기반으로 나머지 부분을 생성하는 것을 목표로 한다. 이 분야는 음악적 요소 간 복잡한 관계를 탐구하는 데 용이하고, 음악을 만드는 데 어려움을 겪는 비전문가들을 도울 수 있다. 최근 연구들은 딥러닝 기술을 활용하여 CGMC 시스템의 성능을 높여왔다. 하지만, 이러한 연구들에는 아직 생성 품질과 제어가능성 측면에서 두 가지의 한계점이 있다. 먼저, 생성된 음악의 음악적 구조가 명확하지 않다. 또한, 아직 좁은 범위의 음악적 요소 및 테스크만이 유연한 제어의 대상으로서 탐구되었다. 이에 본 학위논문에서는 CGMC의 개선을 위해 위 두 가지의 한계점을 해결하고자 한다. 첫 번째로, 음악 구조를 이루는 음악적 위계를 직관적으로 모델링하는 데 집중하고자 한다. 본래 데이터와 음, 화음과 같은 음악적 단위 간 정렬 경로를 사용하여 모델이 음악적으로 의미있는 종속성을 명확하게 배울 수 있도록 한다. 두 번째로, 잠재 표상을 활용하여 새로운 음악적 요소들을 유연하게 제어하고자 한다. 특히 잠재 표상이 의도된 요소에 대해 풀리도록 훈련하기 위해서 비지도 혹은 자가지도 학습 프레임워크을 사용하여 잠재 표상을 제한하도록 한다. 본 학위논문에서는 CGMC 분야의 대표적인 두 테스크인 멜로디 하모나이제이션 및 표현적 연주 렌더링 테스크에 대해 위의 두 가지 방법론을 검증한다. 다양한 실험적 결과들을 통해 제안한 방법론이 CGMC 시스템의 음악적 창의성을 안정적인 생성 품질로 확장할 수 있다는 가능성을 시사한다.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation 5 1.2 Definitions 8 1.3 Tasks of Interest 10 1.3.1 Generation Quality 10 1.3.2 Controllability 12 1.4 Approaches 13 1.4.1 Modeling Musical Hierarchy 14 1.4.2 Regularizing Latent Representations 16 1.4.3 Target Tasks 18 1.5 Outline of the Thesis 19 Chapter 2 Background 22 2.1 Music Generation Tasks 23 2.1.1 Melody Harmonization 23 2.1.2 Expressive Performance Rendering 25 2.2 Structure-enhanced Music Generation 27 2.2.1 Hierarchical Music Generation 27 2.2.2 Transformer-based Music Generation 28 2.3 Disentanglement Learning 29 2.3.1 Unsupervised Approaches 30 2.3.2 Supervised Approaches 30 2.3.3 Self-supervised Approaches 31 2.4 Controllable Music Generation 32 2.4.1 Score Generation 32 2.4.2 Performance Rendering 33 2.5 Summary 34 Chapter 3 Translating Melody to Chord: Structured and Flexible Harmonization of Melody with Transformer 36 3.1 Introduction 36 3.2 Proposed Methods 41 3.2.1 Standard Transformer Model (STHarm) 41 3.2.2 Variational Transformer Model (VTHarm) 44 3.2.3 Regularized Variational Transformer Model (rVTHarm) 46 3.2.4 Training Objectives 47 3.3 Experimental Settings 48 3.3.1 Datasets 49 3.3.2 Comparative Methods 50 3.3.3 Training 50 3.3.4 Metrics 51 3.4 Evaluation 56 3.4.1 Chord Coherence and Diversity 57 3.4.2 Harmonic Similarity to Human 59 3.4.3 Controlling Chord Complexity 60 3.4.4 Subjective Evaluation 62 3.4.5 Qualitative Results 67 3.4.6 Ablation Study 73 3.5 Conclusion and Future Work 74 Chapter 4 Sketching the Expression: Flexible Rendering of Expressive Piano Performance with Self-supervised Learning 76 4.1 Introduction 76 4.2 Proposed Methods 79 4.2.1 Data Representation 79 4.2.2 Modeling Musical Hierarchy 80 4.2.3 Overall Network Architecture 81 4.2.4 Regularizing the Latent Variables 84 4.2.5 Overall Objective 86 4.3 Experimental Settings 87 4.3.1 Dataset and Implementation 87 4.3.2 Comparative Methods 88 4.4 Evaluation 88 4.4.1 Generation Quality 89 4.4.2 Disentangling Latent Representations 90 4.4.3 Controllability of Expressive Attributes 91 4.4.4 KL Divergence 93 4.4.5 Ablation Study 94 4.4.6 Subjective Evaluation 95 4.4.7 Qualitative Examples 97 4.4.8 Extent of Control 100 4.5 Conclusion 102 Chapter 5 Conclusion and Future Work 103 5.1 Conclusion 103 5.2 Future Work 106 5.2.1 Deeper Investigation of Controllable Factors 106 5.2.2 More Analysis of Qualitative Evaluation Results 107 5.2.3 Improving Diversity and Scale of Dataset 108 Bibliography 109 초 록 137박

Mapping wisdom as a complex adaptive system

This is the second of two papers concerning wisdom as an ecosystem appearing in sequential editions of Management & Marketing journal. The notion of wisdom as an ecosystem, or "the wisdom ecology", builds on work by Hays (2007) who first identified wisdom as an organisational construct and proposed a dynamic model of it. The centrepiece of this and its former companion paper is a relationship map of the Wisdom Ecosystem (the Causal Loop Diagram at Figure 1). The first paper, "The Ecology of Wisdom", introduced readers to the topics of wisdom and complex adaptive systems, and presented a dynamic model of the Wisdom Ecosystem. This second paper discusses systems dynamics modelling (mapping systems) and covers the Wisdom Ecosystem model in detail. It describes the four domains, or subsystems, of the Wisdom Ecosystem, Dialogue, Communal Mind, Collective Intelligence, and Wisdom, and walks readers through the model, exploring each of its 25 elements in turn. It examines the relationships amongst system elements and illuminates important aspects of systems function, providing a rare tutorial on developing and using Causal Loop Diagrams.Causal Loop Diagramming, Complexity, Dialogue, Organisational Learning, Systems Dynamics, Wisdom.