Interacting in Natural Language in the era of LLMs: NLP for Online Discussions and Multi-Party Conversations

With the rise of online social media platforms, written conversations among multiple participants have become an essential part of daily communication, enabling users to exchange ideas, share opinions, and engage in discussions. Beyond the textual content of individual messages, the dynamics of participant interactions influence the meaning and the pragmatic aspects of the conversations. In this talk, we will explore the challenges faced by models in processing Multi-Party Conversations (MPCs), the key downstream tasks in this domain, and the importance of incorporating interaction dynamics. Specifically, we will discuss the impact of training data size, highlight critical evaluation challenges, and propose a potential solution to address these issues based on the generation of synthetic MPCs. We will mainly focus on the latter, exploring different models and strategies for generating MPCs under precise constraints. We also introduce an evaluation framework to assess both constraint compliance and generation quality, in order to identify which model-strategy combinations are more effective.
Speaker(s): Nicolò ,
Unska 3, Zagreb, Grad Zagreb, Croatia, 10000