8 papers
Unlocking Proactivity in Task-Oriented Dialogue
Azure Zhang, Ning Gao, Yuqin Dai +7
Proactive task-oriented dialogue (TOD), such as outbound sales, demands a persuasive agent that actively probes the user's concerns and steers the conversation toward acceptance wi…
Overview of the PsyDefDetect Shared Task at BioNLP 2026: Detecting Levels of Psychological Defense Mechanisms in Supportive Conversations
Hongbin Na, Zimu Wang, Zhaoming Chen +8
We present an overview of PsyDefDetect, the shared task on detecting levels of psychological defense mechanisms in emotional support dialogues, co-located with BioNLP@ACL 2026. Gro…
Query pipeline optimization for cancer patient question answering systems
Maolin He, Rena Gao, Mike Conway +1
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mitigates hallucination in Large Language Models (LLMs) by using query pipelines to retrieve relevant external information and grounding respon…
Moderation Matters:Measuring Conversational Moderation Impact in English as a Second Language Group Discussion
Rena Gao, Ming-Bin Chen, Lea Frermann +1
English as a Second Language (ESL) speakers often struggle to engage in group discussions due to language barriers. While moderators can facilitate participation, few studies asses…
Can LLMs Simulate L2-English Dialogue? An Information-Theoretic Analysis of L1-Dependent Biases
Rena Gao, Xuetong Wu, Tatsuki Kuribayashi +6
This study evaluates Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to simulate non-native-like English use observed in human second language (L2) learners interfered with by their native f…
An Interpretable and Crosslingual Method for Evaluating Second-Language Dialogues
Rena Gao, Jingxuan Wu, Xuetong Wu +4
We analyse the cross-lingual transferability of a dialogue evaluation framework that assesses the relationships between micro-level linguistic features (e.g. backchannels) and macr…