Gunrock 2.0 is built on top of Gunrock with an emphasis on user adaptation. Gunrock 2.0 combines various neural natural language understanding modules, including named entity detection, linking, and dialog act prediction, to improve user understanding. Its dialog management is a hierarchical model that handles various topics, such as movies, music, and sports. The system-level dialog manager can handle question detection, acknowledgment, error handling, and additional functions, making downstream modules much easier to design and implement. The dialog manager also adapts its topic selection to accommodate different users' profile information, such as inferred gender and personality. The generation model is a mix of templates and neural generation models. Gunrock 2.0 is able to achieve an average rating of 3.73 at its latest build from May 29 th to June 4 th .

In recent years, chatbots have been empowered to engage in social conversations with humans and have the potential to elicit people to disclose their personal experiences, opinions, and emotions. However, how and to what extent people respond to chabots' self-disclosure remain less known. In this work, we designed a social chatbot with three self-disclosure levels that conducted small talks and provided relevant recommendations to people. 372 MTurk participants were randomized to one of the four groups with different self-disclosure levels to converse with the chatbot on two topics, movies, and COVID-19. We found that people's self-disclosure level was strongly reciprocal to a chatbot's self-disclosure level. Chatbots' self-disclosure also positively impacted engagement and users' perception of the bot and led to a more effective recommendation such that participants enjoyed and agreed more with the recommendations.

Open-domain dialog systems have a usercentric goal: to provide humans with an engaging conversation experience. User engagement is one of the most important metrics for evaluating open-domain dialog systems, and could also be used as real-time feedback to benefit dialog policy learning. Existing work on detecting user disengagement typically requires hand-labeling many dialog samples. We propose HERALD, an efficient annotation framework that reframes the training data annotation process as a denoising problem. Specifically, instead of manually labeling training samples, we first use a set of labeling heuristics to label training samples automatically. We then denoise the weakly labeled data using the Shapley algorithm. Finally, we use the denoised data to train a user engagement detector. Our experiments show that HERALD improves annotation efficiency significantly and achieves 86% user disengagement detection accuracy in two dialog corpora.

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This paper investigates users’ speech rate adjustments during conversations with an Amazon Alexa socialbot in response to situational (in-lab vs. at-home) and communicative (ASR comprehension errors) factors. We collected user interaction studies and measured speech rate at each turn in the conversation and in baseline productions (collected prior to the interaction). Overall, we find that users slow their speech rate when talking to the bot, relative to their pre-interaction productions, consistent with hyperarticulation. Speakers use an even slower speech rate in the in-lab setting (relative to at-home). We also see evidence for turn-level entrainment: the user follows the directionality of Alexa’s changes in rate in the immediately preceding turn. Yet, we do not see differences in hyperarticulation or entrainment in response to ASR errors, or on the basis of user ratings of the interaction. Overall, this work has implications for human-computer interaction and theories of linguistic adaptation and entrainment.