Akanksha Malhotra

Seyed Hossein Alavi, Sudha Rao, Ashutosh Adhikari et al.

We propose a novel approach that uses large language models (LLMs) to generate persona-driven conversations between Players and Non-Player Characters (NPC) in games. Showcasing the application of our methodology, we introduce the Minecraft Persona-driven Dialogue dataset (MCPDial). Starting with a small seed of expert-written conversations, we employ our method to generate hundreds of additional conversations. Each conversation in the dataset includes rich character descriptions of the player and NPC. The conversations are long, allowing for in-depth and extensive interactions between the player and NPC. MCPDial extends beyond basic conversations by incorporating canonical function calls (e.g. "Call find a resource on iron ore") between the utterances. Finally, we conduct a qualitative analysis of the dataset to assess its quality and characteristics.

Ashish Sharma, Sudha Rao, Chris Brockett et al.

Agency, the capacity to proactively shape events, is central to how humans interact and collaborate. While LLMs are being developed to simulate human behavior and serve as human-like agents, little attention has been given to the Agency that these models should possess in order to proactively manage the direction of interaction and collaboration. In this paper, we investigate Agency as a desirable function of LLMs, and how it can be measured and managed. We build on social-cognitive theory to develop a framework of features through which Agency is expressed in dialogue - indicating what you intend to do (Intentionality), motivating your intentions (Motivation), having self-belief in intentions (Self-Efficacy), and being able to self-adjust (Self-Regulation). We collect a new dataset of 83 human-human collaborative interior design conversations containing 908 conversational snippets annotated for Agency features. Using this dataset, we develop methods for measuring Agency of LLMs. Automatic and human evaluations show that models that manifest features associated with high Intentionality, Motivation, Self-Efficacy, and Self-Regulation are more likely to be perceived as strongly agentive.

Christopher M Ormerod, Akanksha Malhotra, Amir Jafari

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) is a cross-disciplinary effort involving Education, Linguistics, and Natural Language Processing (NLP). The efficacy of an NLP model in AES tests it ability to evaluate long-term dependencies and extrapolate meaning even when text is poorly written. Large pretrained transformer-based language models have dominated the current state-of-the-art in many NLP tasks, however, the computational requirements of these models make them expensive to deploy in practice. The goal of this paper is to challenge the paradigm in NLP that bigger is better when it comes to AES. To do this, we evaluate the performance of several fine-tuned pretrained NLP models with a modest number of parameters on an AES dataset. By ensembling our models, we achieve excellent results with fewer parameters than most pretrained transformer-based models.

Akanksha Malhotra, Sudhir Kamle

The objective of this project is to solve one of the major problems faced by the people having word processing issues like trauma, or mild mental disability. "ARTH" is the short form of Algorithm for Reading Handily. ARTH is a self-learning set of algorithms that is an intelligent way of fulfilling the need for "reading and understanding the text effortlessly" which adjusts according to the needs of every user. The research project propagates in two steps. In the first step, the algorithm tries to identify the difficult words present in the text based on two features -- the number of syllables and usage frequency -- using a clustering algorithm. After the analysis of the clusters, the algorithm labels these clusters, according to their difficulty level. In the second step, the algorithm interacts with the user. It aims to test the user's comprehensibility of the text and his/her vocabulary level by taking an automatically generated quiz. The algorithm identifies the clusters which are difficult for the user, based on the result of the analysis. The meaning of perceived difficult words is displayed next to them. The technology "ARTH" focuses on the revival of the joy of reading among those people, who have a poor vocabulary or any word processing issues.