Interacting in Natural Language in the era of LLMs: NLP for Online Discussions and Multi-Party Conversations
Abstract: 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.
Short bio: Nicolò Penzo is a third-year PhD Student in Information Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Trento, holding a scholarship funded by the Digital Humanities group at Fondazione Bruno Kessler. He is also part of the ELLIS PhD programme and is currently spending six months at the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, University of Würzburg. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering from University of Padua. His PhD project deals with the design, analysis and evaluation of models to perform downstream tasks on Multi-Party Conversations (MPCs). The thesis's main focus is the generation of synthetic MPCs, by combining NLP solutions (i.e., transformer-based models) with techniques from network analysis. The goal is to diagnose the models' behavior in different interactional scenarios and favour privacy-preserving solutions. Other research interests involve detection and contrast of toxic language on social media, and interactions among LLMs.
Presenter: Nicolò Penzo
Date: 2025-04-09 11:30 (CEST)
Location: Oficinas ELLIS Alicante, Muelle Pte., 5 – Edificio A, Alicante 03001, Alicante ES
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This talk is part of the ELLIS / FBK-MobS Workshop.