MOHAPATRA Biswesh

PhD student

Inria

biswesh.mohapatra [at] inria.fr

Short bio

Integrated Master of Technology in Computer Science Engineering from IIIT Bangalore

Research project

Improving multimodal dialogue systems through conversational grounding.

Short abstract

This project plans to dive deep into the issues regarding conversational grounding. The thesis intends to do the following – 1) It will investigate why modern neural networks trained on vast amounts of data are unable to solve the phenomenon of conversational grounding in current dialogue systems. 2) It will investigate old approaches to conversational grounding for neural network-based models. 3) It will look into the role of nonverbal behavior such as eye gaze and head nods in conversational grounding, and how insights from cognitive science studies of these phenomena can be integrated into deep learning approaches. 4) The project aims to then build computational models that take conversational grounding into account and help the state-of-the-art conversational models like BlendorBot [5] or dialoGPT [6] to generate more consistent dialogues. 5) It will also develop methods to quantify and test the phenomenon of conversational grounding. 6) Finally, it will evaluate the success of these models in human-chatbot conversation, by looking at whether users are more successful in human-computer collaborative tasks.