When individuals engage in spoken discourse, various phenomena can be observed that differ from those that are apparent in text-based conversation. While written communication commonly uses a question mark to denote a query, in spoken discourse, queries are frequently indicated by a rising intonation at the end of a sentence. However, numerous speech recognition engines do not append a question mark to recognized queries, presenting a challenge when creating a spoken dialogue system. Specifically, the absence of a question mark at the end of a sentence can impede the generation of appropriate responses to queries in spoken dialogue systems. Hence, we investigate the impact of question marks on dialogue systems, with the results showing that they have a significant impact. Moreover, we analyze specific examples in an effort to determine which types of utterances have the impact on dialogue systems.

With the ambition to create avatars capable of human-level casual conversation, we developed an open-domain avatar chatbot, situated in a virtual reality environment, that employs a large language model (LLM). Introducing the LLM posed several challenges for multimodal integration, such as developing techniques to align diverse outputs and avatar control, as well as addressing the issue of slow generation speed. To address these challenges, we integrated various external modules into our system. Our system is based on the award-winning model from the Dialogue System Live Competition 5. Through this work, we hope to stimulate discussions within the research community about the potential and challenges of multimodal dialogue systems enhanced with LLMs.

This paper presents our system submitted for the CoNLL 2017 Shared Task, “Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies.” We ran the system for all languages with our own fully pipelined components without relying on re-trained baseline systems. To train the dependency parser, we used only the universal part-of-speech tags and distance between words, and applied deterministic rules to assign dependency labels. The simple and delexicalized models are suitable for cross-lingual transfer approaches and a universal language model. Experimental results show that our model performed well in some metrics and leads discussion on topics such as contribution of each component and on syntactic similarities among languages.