Researchers at Tufts University have identified root causes for AI’s poor conversational timing.
When you have a conversation today, notice the natural points when the exchange leaves open the opportunity for the other person to chime in. If their timing is off, they might be taken as overly aggressive, too timid, or just plain awkward.
The back-and-forth is the social element to the exchange of information that occurs in a conversation, and while humans do this naturally—with some exceptions—AI language systems are universally bad at it.
Linguistics and computer science researchers at Tufts have now discovered some of the root causes of this shortfall in AI conversational skills and point to possible ways to make them better conversational partners. Their study results will be presented at the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2024) conference, held in Miami from November 12 to 16, and are posted to the arXiv preprint server.
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