Welcome ...

... to the website of the Dialogue Modeling Group in Amsterdam!

We carry out research at the interface of computational linguistics, cognitive modelling and artificial intelligence. Our aim is to understand how we use language to communicate with each other in situated environments and how dialogue interaction shapes learning -- about the world and about language itself. These are some of the topics we work on: Semantics and pragmatics of dialogue phenomena, visually grounded language and visual reasoning, conversational agents and learning from interaction, language variation and change in communities of speakers.

News

• 15/12/2021 Justine Winkler has joined our team as PhD candidate. Welcome, Justine!
• 01/10/2021 Joris Baan has joined the group as ELLIS PhD candidate, co-supervised by Barbara Plank. Welcome, Joris!
• 01/09/2021 Sandro Pezzelle is now Assistant Professor in Responsible AI at the ILLC - congrats, Sandro!
• New work by our group to appear at EMNLP, CoNLL, TACL, and SemDial; checkout our publications.
• 22/02/2021 Blog post by science journalist Iris Proff, this time featuring work led by Ece on using human gaze to guide image description generation. Ece will be discussing this work at the AI Meetings of Koç University on 9 March.
• 15/12/2020 Blog post by science journlist Iris Proff featuring Marco's work on fake news detection.
• 10/12/2020 Mario's MSc AI thesis on lexical semantic change has received the Amsterdam Data Science MSc Thesis Award!
• 06/11/2020 Congrats to Marco, who has successfuly defended his PhD thesis Linguistic Variation in Online Communities: A Computational Perspective

People

MSc Students / Research Assistants

• Lennert Jansen (controlled generation in dialogue)
• Sammuel Ryb (analytical and logical reasoning in large language models)
• Gabriele Gennaro (agent adaptation in reference games)
• Xinyi Chen (language understanding and reasoning abilities of visually grounded models)
• Pauline Sander (meaning change; Erasmus+ student from Saarland)

Alumni (incomplete list)

Marco Del Tredici, PhD candidate 2017-2020, moved to Machine Learning Scientist at Amazon Berlin.
Elia Bruni, postdoc 2016-2018, moved to Marie Curie fellow at UPF Barcelona.
Ravi Shekhar, PhD candidate 2016-2019, based in Tento and co-supervised with Raffaella Bernardi; moved to postdoc at Queen Mary University of London.
Julian J. Schlöder, PhD candiate 2014-2018, moved to postdoc at the ILLC.
Janosch Haber, MSc student 2018-2019, moved to PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London.
Laura Aina, MSc student 2015-2017, moved to PhD candidate at UPF Barcelona.
Bill Noble, MSc student 2014-2016, moved to PhD candidate at CLASP, University of Gothenburg.

Resources

Datasets, code, and other publicly available resources developed by the Dialogue Modelling Group.

Language and vision

• Generating Image Descriptions via Sequential Cross-Modal Alignment Guided by Human Gaze
  Code repository for our work on leveraging eye-tracking data to model image description generation.
• MALeViC: Modeling Adjectives Leveraging Visual Contexts
  Dataset of synthetic images with pairs of statements and truth values related to size adjectives, as well as code repository for serveral experiments and analyses that leverage this dataset.
• The PhotoBook Dataset: Building Common Ground through Visually Grounded Dialogue
  A large-scale collection of 2,500 human-human, visually-grounded and goal-oriented English conversations between pairs of participants. Funded by ParlAI, Facebook AI Research. The website includes links to download several subsets of the data and to code repositories for several experiments and models.
• VISTA: Visually Grounded Talking Agents
  Code and overview of research on visually-grounded language in interactive settings presented in a series of papers led jointly with Raffaella Bernardi.

Linguistic variation and change

• DUPS: Diachronic Usage Pair Similarity
  Dataset of similarity judgements of English word usage pairs from different time periods, as described by Giulianelli et al. 2020
• Short-term Meaning Shift
  Dataset of words annotated by users of the subredit r/LiverpoolFC for meaning change. See Del Tredici et al. 2019.
• The Road to Success
  Dataset from 20 Reddit forums (subedits) and code to reproduce the findings by Del Tredici and Fernández 2018.

Other topics

• The LAMBADA dataset: Word prediction requiring a broad discourse context
  Dataset to evaluate the capabilities of computational models for text understanding by means of a word prediction task. See Paperno et al. 2016.
• Corrective Feedback in First Language Acquisition
  Dataset of corrective feedback moves in CHILDES corpora annotated according to the taxonomy proposed by Hiller and Fernández 2016.
• How to Reject What in Dialogue
  Dataset of rejection moves from several dialogue corpora annotated according to the rejection taxonomy proposed by Schlöder and Fernández 2019.
• Collective Annotation
  Datasets and resources related to the problem of aggregating the judgements of multiple individuals, regarding a linguistic annotation task or similar, into a single collective judgement that reflects the view of the community. Project jointly led with Ulle Endriss.
• Quantified Referring Expressions
  Data from an online elicitation experiment on the use of quantified referring expressions.

Publications

News archive

• New work by our group published at EMNLP (Generating Image Descriptions via Sequential Cross-Modal Alignment Guided by Human Gaze and Refer, Reuse, Reduce...), at Findings of EMNLP (Be Different to Be Better!), at COLING (Words are the Window to the Soul...) and at CLiC-It (Grounded and Ungrounded Referring Expressions in Human Dialogues).
• ACL 2020: Mario will be presenting the paper Analysing Lexical Semantic Change with Contextualised Word Representations, Lieke the paper Learning to Understand Child-directed and Adult-directed Speech and Ece will be a live microblogger in the Language Grounding track (@ecekt2).
• Spring 2020: Sandro and Raquel were awarded a grant by the Research Priority Area Human(e) AI to carry out an interdisciplinary project on adaptation of conversational agents to different age groups.
• Spring 2020: Ece has joined EACL's student board.