Goal Of Dialogue Research Articles

Cooper: Coordinating Specialized Agents towards a Complex Dialogue Goal

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in exploring dialogues with more complex goals, such as negotiation, persuasion, and emotional support, which go beyond traditional service-focused dialogue systems. Apart from the requirement for much more sophisticated strategic reasoning and communication skills, a significant challenge of these tasks lies in the difficulty of objectively measuring the achievement of their goals in a quantifiable way, making it difficult for existing research to directly optimize the dialogue procedure towards them. In our work, we emphasize the multifaceted nature of complex dialogue goals and argue that it is more feasible to accomplish them by comprehensively considering and jointly promoting their different aspects. To this end, we propose a novel dialogue framework, Cooper, which coordinates multiple specialized agents, each dedicated to a specific dialogue goal aspect separately, to approach the complex objective. Through this divide-and-conquer manner, we make complex dialogue goals more approachable and elicit greater intelligence via the collaboration of individual agents. Experiments on persuasion and emotional support dialogues demonstrate the superiority of our method over a set of competitive baselines. Our codes are available at https://github.com/YiCheng98/Cooper.

Options for substantiating protein content claims for conventional foods.

In Canada and the United States, front-of-package protein content claims require data to support the quality of the protein. In general, protein quality reflects the product of the amino acid composition of the food protein relative to human amino acid requirements and a measure of digestibility. The currently accepted method in both jurisdictions is the protein digestibility-corrected amino acid score (PDCAAS) that requires the measurement of true fecal protein (nitrogen) digestibility. The latter must be measured in vivo using a rat model. This requirement for animal testing is inconsistent with international efforts to reduce the usage of animals in testing for regulatory purposes. The current commentary positions four options to remove the need to use animal testing for determining protein quality, when considering protein content claim substantiation. These options include (i) a focus on protein quantity alone; (ii) the use of the amino acid score alone, with no correction for digestibility; (iii) the use of a fixed digestibility coefficient to estimate protein quality; and (iv) the use of in vitro methods to measure protein and/or amino acid digestibility. The relative merits and deficiencies of the options are positioned with the goal of encouraging dialogue within the regulatory agencies to move towards alternative approaches for substantiating protein content claims on foods, including those derived from plant-based sources.

Endowment Effect: Impact Factors and Influencing Mechanism

As a theoretical branch of behavioral economics, the endowment effect (EE) reflects the research method of behavioral economics, challenges the assumption that people are rational in traditional economics, and complements the deficiency of the Coase theorem by emphasizing that the phenomenon that people overvalue an item after owning, then it will affect the transaction of the item. In this paper, the author introduces the basic theories about the EE, analyzes the driving factors of the EE, and introduces the latest research findings on the basis of the loss aversion (LA) theory, providing readers with a new way to understand the EE. At the same time, as a link impressionable to the EE in the transaction, the author also analyzes and compares the research results of previous researchers on the influence of EE on the negotiation process, analyzes the reasons why the negotiation participants should avoid or reduce the influence of EE in the negotiation to achieve the goal of negotiation, and puts forward suggestions for the negotiators.

Boundary experts: Science and politics in measuring the Sustainable Development Goals

AbstractThe Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) purport to cleanly separate politics and technical matters, embodied by the political negotiation of goals and targets, and the technical creation of an indicator framework. This article analyses how this boundary between science and politics is managed in practice. The statisticians tasked with selecting indicators through the Inter‐agency and Expert Group on Sustainable Development Goal Indicators (IAEG‐SDGs) are seconded to a global process from national statistical offices. Boundary management requires acceptance of certain normative and political aspects of creating an indicator framework, such as claims to national relevance. Others, like overt national intervention, are however considered impermissible. Each statistician must manage their role as a boundary expert that experience irresolvable tensions due to representing specific countries while being mandated to propound scientific practices and norms. Building on this empirical inquiry, the article sketches out a new normative ideal for knowledge pluralism in the measurement of sustainable development. It argues that indicator processes would benefit from more pluralistic indicator bodies than the IAEG‐SDGs. Including diversified knowledge and perspectives from civil society and international organisations would explicate already existing political contestation. It would also contribute to capturing more of the complexities of sustainable development in future monitoring frameworks through consideration of a broader selection of methodologies.

Analysis of The "Get Smart Plus 4" Textbook from The Eil Perspectives

Textbooks are crucial ELT resources for instructors and students to comprehend the subject being learned since they are filled with linguistic knowledge and cultural aspects. From the English as an International Language (EIL) perspective, English textbooks need to expose students to a variety of English language variations, including a variety of characters from different cultural backgrounds and a variety of cultural representations. This qualitative study employs a content analysis method to evaluate the extent to which the Get Smart Plus 4 textbook incorporates linguistic and cultural diversity. The research objective is to examine the textbook's content, including characters and language varieties, and assess its alignment with the goals of EIL and lingua-cultural dialogue. By analyzing the textbook's content, the study aims to identify the presence or absence of linguistic resources that implicitly display variation in English varieties. The findings reveal that while the textbook includes characters from various cultural and geographic origins, it tends to favour the inner circle form of English, thereby overlooking other English varieties. This absence of linguistic resources undermines the goal of EIL, which stresses the importance of lingua-cultural dialogue. These findings highlight the need for ELT materials to foster a broader range of English language variations to promote a more inclusive and culturally diverse learning environment.

Understanding Understanding, the Foundation of Interreligious Dialogue

This paper seeks to explore the academic approach to interreligious dialogue by outlining some key features of what the author sees as its philosophical foundation: understanding. It argues that understanding what it is to understand is crucial to developing interreligious dialogue because, at its core, the goal of such dialogue is the exchange of differing religious understandings for mutual benefit. Thus, the author contends that a thorough academic perspective on interreligious dialogue can only be established if a robust account of understanding is first constructed. Having addressed this, the author outlines three key features of understanding: subjectivity, internality, and appreciation of the whole. Following this, a curious aspect of the generation of new understanding is explored, namely the seeming link between leisure, the absence of so-called “servile” work, and the generation of new insights. Whilst this collection of key features is by no means exhaustive, this paper seeks only to open a conversation on the nature of understanding that has been noticeably absent from philosophical and theological discussion in recent years. Given this, the author hopes to open avenues through which others might critique, explore, or add to the features identified in this article in order to expand the neglected field of the Philosophy of Understanding.

Longitudinal Process of Setting and Achieving Activity- and Participation-Level Goals in Home Rehabilitation in Japan: A Qualitative Study Using Trajectory Equifinality Modeling.

This study aimed to clarify the longitudinal goal negotiation and collaboration process of achieving activity- and participation-level goals. We conducted a qualitative study using the trajectory equifinality model. Nine occupational therapists with experience in setting and achieving activity- and participation-level goals were recruited and interviewed about their clients. We identified two phases and four pathways in the setting and attainment process for activity- and participation-level goals. Throughout the longitudinal goal-setting process, when the occupational therapist and client had difficulty discussing activity- and participation-level goals, the therapist respected the client's expectations, explained the purpose of occupational therapy in detail, and conducted individual face-to-face interviews. When it was difficult to provide work-based interventions, the occupational therapist made flexible use of functional training, elemental movement training, occupation-based practice, and environmental modifications. The results of this study may assist in supporting clients to improve their activity and participation in home rehabilitation.

End-to-end dialogue structure parsing on multi-floor dialogue based on multi-task learning.

A multi-floor dialogue consists of multiple sets of dialogue participants, each conversing within their own floor. In the multi-floor dialogue, at least one multi-communicating member who is a participant of multiple floors and coordinates each to achieve a shared dialogue goal. The structure of such dialogues can be complex, involving intentional structure and relations that are within or across floors. In this study, We proposed a neural dialogue structure parser with an attention mechanism that applies multi-task learning to automatically identify the dialogue structure of multi-floor dialogues in a collaborative robot navigation domain. Furthermore, we propose to use dialogue response prediction as an auxiliary objective of the multi-floor dialogue structure parser to enhance the consistency of the multi-floor dialogue structure parsing. Our experimental results show that our proposed model improved the dialogue structure parsing performance more than conventional models in multi-floor dialogue.

Authentic questions as prompts for productive and constructive sequences: A pragmatic approach to classroom dialogue and argumentation

Goal. The problem of the authenticity of teacher questions has not received sufficient attention from educational researchers interested in the intersection between dialogue and argumentation. In this paper, we adopt a definition of authentic questions as dialogical units that prompt teacher-student interactions that are both productive (i.e., several students participating) and constructive (i.e., students produce arguments of high complexity). Our goal is to analyze whether and how specific types of dialogue prompts can encourage students’ engagement in more sophisticated argumentative interactions, as manifested through the construction of high-complexity arguments. Method. We describe the implementation of our analytical approach to a large corpus of classroom interactions from five European countries. The corpus was segmented into dialogical sequences, which were then coded according to the argumentation dialogue goal expressed in the sequence. We also coded students’ arguments according to Toulmin’s elements and distinguished between low- and high-complexity arguments from a structural point of view. Findings. Our findings show the predominance of the so-called Discovery questions as prompts that are both productive and constructive and Inquiry questions as prompts of argumentative constructive interactions. We discuss the importance of these findings for teacher professional development purposes.

Implications from Japan's CPTPP Negotiations and Trade Situation

This study conducted an analysis of Japan's negotiation strategy and its impact on the pork industry as Japan pursued accession to the CPTPP agreement. Due to the CPTPP's principle of no exceptions in tariff elimination, Japan has consistently emphasized its negotiation goal of minimizing agricultural liberalization, with pork being the most representative product. Through an analysis of Japan's pork import situation, this study derived the characteristics of Japan's pork tariff system. It appears that Japan is implementing very strong protective measures against pork imports through measures such as the gate price system, but an examination of import trends shows that the gate price system is hardly functioning. This observation holds true even after the conclusion of the CPTPP. As trade systems and actual operational situations may differ among countries, it is necessary to analyze these situations carefully and formulate negotiation strategies that can maximize our country's interests.

An analysis of teleworking management practices.

Organizational changes in the traditional work models demand studies on the management of the so called "Teleworking". This research aims to analyse the teleworking management practices to subside organizations and leaders to improve their performance and enhance workers quality of life. A survey was carried out with teleworkers to obtain their perception of the analyzed factors, using the survey monkey tool. The collected data were analyzed using Partial Least Squares - Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). The validated model for the practices analysis is composed of the constructs: business management, physical and people infrastructure, leadership, self-esteem, and job satisfaction. Based on the analysis carried out, it is suggested that organizations establish organizational telework policies, follow government policies and provide communication and competence plans. Moreover, it is crucial providing technologies and support to them and develop people management practices in teleworking. Leaders must provide confidence, a teleworking culture, professional advancement, integration, well-being, negotiation of goals and a training plan. The teleworker's satisfaction is due to the sustainability related to the work model and its choice defined by personal motivation, balance between personal and professional life and a sense of belonging. All variables observed, linked to the constructs and validated, can be considered by managers to improve human resource management and obtain better productivity results.

University-Community Collaborations: A Vehicle for Capacity Building and Mutual Learning within an Immigrant Mental Health Coalition

University-community collaborations represent a valuable opportunity for colleges and universities to leverage expertise, research, and skills to enhance the work of community organizations dedicated to social justice and equity for marginalized and oppressed groups. Successful university-community collaborations require mutually negotiated goals, significant investment of monetary and non-monetary resources and mutual benefits for all stakeholders. Yet, important gaps remain in the university-community collaborations literature and specifically around better understanding partner involvement, capacity building, and mutual learning. This case study describes how university assets can be mobilized to expand coalition resources. The process between the stakeholders of negotiating scopes of work, defining roles, accommodating challenges encountered and suggested best practices are discussed.

God in dialogue with His creation

Christian faith, theology and natural sciences are brought into conversation with each other to analyse different aspects of the dialogue between God and his creation. The methodological approach consists of bringing research results from theology and the natural sciences documented in current publications as well as philosophical considerations into a dialogue with the Christian faith. Furthermore, the chronological development is given special attention. Both philosophical considerations and physical observations show that this universe was created by a transcendent intelligent supreme being, the Christian God, and that it is very important for this supreme being to communicate with the intelligent living beings in this universe. God entered and continues to enter into an ever more intense and intimate dialogue with his creation in various ways, both in Earth history and evolution, and in the history of the people of Israel, as well as today in the Christian era. To remove all possible barriers and obstacles to dialogue, God himself became man in Jesus Christ. The incarnation of Jesus Christ is the culmination of the dialogue between God and his creation. The incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ had a very great impact on the triune God. God gives himself so much to the dialogue with his creation that he takes into his innermost being the human body of Jesus Christ, which is a part of his creation marked by time. At the end of time, all human beings who have chosen God will live eternally with each other and with the triune God in comprehensive and fulfilling communion. This all-encompassing and all-fulfilling dialogue of love will originate from the triune God and will fill and glorify the whole of creation. The article shows that dialogue is central to understanding the relationship between God and his creation. The intra-Trinitarian dialogue of love between the three persons of God is the starting point, model and goal of both creation and God's dialogue with his creation. Contribution: The synthesis of Christian faith, theology and natural sciences makes it possible to see more clearly how much God is in dialogue with his creation. This can help us to recognise more deeply God's love for his creation and especially for us humans, and to act from this insight.

複数の目標を持つ誘導対話のための話題管理部の階層型制御アーキテクチャ

In a dialogue system, when there is a dialogue goal for the dialogue system that is independent of the user's dialogue goal, a dialogue that tries to reach a topic for that goal while coming to terms with the user (i.e., target-guided dialogue) has the potential to be useful for applications such as advertising and recommendation. However, in the case of multiple target-guided strategies, the complexity and multiplicity of designs for switching between target-guided strategies is a challenge. In this paper, we propose the hierarchical structure for dialogue management method, which alleviates the complexity and multiplicity of designing such target-guided strategy switching. It is found that the proposed method automatically complements the topic transitions of skipping, modifying, and sliding, and enhances naturalness of transitions and interest in guided topics.

FaithDial: A Faithful Benchmark for Information-Seeking Dialogue

Abstract The goal of information-seeking dialogue is to respond to seeker queries with natural language utterances that are grounded on knowledge sources. However, dialogue systems often produce unsupported utterances, a phenomenon known as hallucination. To mitigate this behavior, we adopt a data-centric solution and create FaithDial, a new benchmark for hallucination-free dialogues, by editing hallucinated responses in the Wizard of Wikipedia (WoW) benchmark. We observe that FaithDial is more faithful than WoW while also maintaining engaging conversations. We show that FaithDial can serve as training signal for: i) a hallucination critic, which discriminates whether an utterance is faithful or not, and boosts the performance by 12.8 F1 score on the BEGIN benchmark compared to existing datasets for dialogue coherence; ii) high-quality dialogue generation. We benchmark a series of state-of-the-art models and propose an auxiliary contrastive objective that achieves the highest level of faithfulness and abstractiveness based on several automated metrics. Further, we find that the benefits of FaithDial generalize to zero-shot transfer on other datasets, such as CMU-Dog and TopicalChat. Finally, human evaluation reveals that responses generated by models trained on FaithDial are perceived as more interpretable, cooperative, and engaging.

Goal-oriented conditional variational autoencoders for proactive and knowledge-aware conversational recommender system

Conversational recommender system is designed to proactively elicit the user preferences in a dialogue manner, which could effectively improve the user experience as well as the accuracy of recommendation compared with the traditional static recommender systems. As a powerful technique to flexibly produce context-dependent responses, generative dialogue systems have been widely studied. To further improve the meaningfulness and diversity of responses, a number of remarkable researches have been proposed to enrich the inputs of generative model and utilize them effectively. In this work, we focus on capturing the discourse-level features of responses to improve the quality of generation, and propose a novel goal-oriented conditional variational autoencoders model. Our model uses the latent variable guided by dialogue goal to learn the distribution over potential responses and generates informative and diverse results. Moreover, a response-aware knowledge discernment mechanism is proposed which employs the discourse-level response features to accurately discern related knowledge facts and further facilitate the response generation. Extensive experimental studies are conducted to prove the effectiveness of the proposed approaches, the results of the automatic evaluation, the human evaluation as well as the ablation studies demonstrate the potential of this work.11The work was done during the first author’s internship at Ping An Technology and code is available at https://github.com/apprivoiser/GoCVAE.

Beating the Rival but Losing the Game: How Rivalry Shifts Negotiator Goals Away from Value Claiming

Decades of negotiations research has revealed the importance of BATNA – best alternatives to negotiated agreement. Negotiators with stronger BATNAs tend to have greater power and claim higher values in negotiation. In addition to the value of the BATNA, the current work suggests that how the identity of negotiators’ BATNAs – that is, who they have an alternative offer from – can affect negotiation strategies. Specifically, we apply a relational lens to the BATNA dynamics and examine how negotiators respond to a counterpart that has an alternative offer from their rival. The three experimental studies show that the alternative offer from a rival activates a goal of defeating the rival and leads negotiators to make a more favorable offer to their counterparts. The effect of rivalry on the favorability of offers was partially driven by the increase in motivation to defeat the rival, which further shields the usual goal in negotiation of getting a good deal. Our model and results show that competing against a rival drives negotiators to set a less aspirational goal, which may adversely impact their decision-making.

A Review of Plan-Based Approaches for Dialogue Management

Dialogue systems deliver a more natural mean of communication between humans and machines when compared to traditional systems. Beyond input/output components that understand and generate natural language utterances, the core of a dialogue system is the dialogue manager. The aim of the dialogue manager is to mimic all cognitive aspects related to a natural conversation and it is responsible for identifying the current state of the dialogue and for deciding the next action to be taken by a dialogue system. Artificial intelligence (AI) planning is one of the techniques available in the literature for dialogue management. In a dialogue system, AI planning deals with the action selection problem by treating each utterance as an action and by choosing the actions that get closer to the dialogue goal. This work aims to provide a systematic literature review (SLR) that investigates recent contributions to plan-based dialogue management. This SLR aims at answering research questions concerning: (i) the types of AI planning exploited for dialogue management; (ii) the planning characteristics that justify its adoption in dialogue system; (iii) and, the challenges posed on the development of plan-based dialogue managers. The present SLR was performed by querying four scientific repositories, followed by a manual search on works from the most eminent authors in the field. Further works that were cited by the retrieved papers were also considered for inclusion. Our final corpus is composed of forty works, including only works published since 2014. The results indicate that AI planning is still an emerging strategy for dialogue management. Although AI planning can offer a strong contribution to dialogue systems, especially to those that require predictability, some relevant challenges might still limit its adoption. Our results contributed to discussions in the field and they highlight some research gaps to be addressed in future studies.

Does BDS Produce Antisemitic Disruption to Student Government and Jewish Student Life? An Analysis of Pro-BDS Resolutions at Ohio State University and the Exclusion of Jewish Students on Campus

Abstract The proliferation of debates and resolutions related to the “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” movement at US colleges and universities raises questions about the relation­ship between the objectives of Israel- and Palestine-related student activism with that of student governments and their nature and purpose within campus life. This study makes use of direct observation by the first author of two debates held at Ohio State University (OSU) in January 2018 and December 2018 over resolutions proposed to the university’s Undergraduate Student Government (USG) to adopt a pro-BDS platform. The authors examine the recognition and non-recognition of Jewish students’ right to perceive and identify racism and exclusion within these contexts. The authors further examine whether purported goals of inclusion, constructive dialogue and conflict resolution are benefited by contemporary BDS resolution debates, concluding that such goals-in addition to the formal purpose and function of student governments-are ill-served by the process, con­tent, and outcomes of debates in the form taken at OSU.

الحوار العقدي: (أهميته، أنواعه، وضوابطه)

أصيب العالم الإسلامي بفتن كثيرة، من الغلو والتفسير الناقص للنصوص وتأويلها، فسهل على أقوام قذف المسلمين بالبدعة والكفر والجهل والشرك في مسائل خلافية ليست محلاً لهذه الأوصاف، بل ليست محلاً للتجهيل والتخطئة فيكف بالتكفير والتبديع؟، وإن الداء العضال الذي استشرى في زماننا، وأدى إلى ظهور كثير من التناقضات هو غياب سنة الحوار التي هي أهم المهمات، فإن قواعد الحوار والاختلاف وضوابطه هي العاصم بين المتحاورين من الوقوع في الغلو أو السب أو عدم قبول الحق، وفي هذا البحث بيان وتعريف للحوار وأهميته وبيان أنواعه وأسلوبه وضوابطه والذي نخلص من خلاله إلى أنّ: 1- الحوار منهج رباني من المفاهيم الراقية الأكثر تعاملاً كما جاء في القرآن الكريم، 2- كما أن الحوار من أنفع الوسائل التي يتوصل بها إلى الحق، 3- الالتزام بضوابط الحوار هو أقصر الطرق للوصول إلى الغاية المنشودة من الحوار وتحقيق النتائج المطلوبة، 4- حوار القرآن للمشركين والكفار والمنافقين كل حسب حاله ومعتقدته فيحاور المشرك حوار هداية والمنافقين حوار شدة وتعنيف وتهديد والكفار حوار تحدٍّ وتخويف.