Finding A Voice: Evaluating African American Dialect Generation for Chatbot Technology

As chatbots become increasingly integrated into everyday tasks, designing systems that accommodate diverse user populations is crucial for fostering trust, engagement, and inclusivity. This study investigates the ability of contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and evaluates the impact of AAVE usage on user experiences in chatbot applications. We analyze the performance of three LLM families (Llama, GPT, and Claude) in producing AAVE-like utterances at varying dialect intensities and assess user preferences across multiple domains, including healthcare and education. Despite LLMs' proficiency in generating AAVE-like language, findings indicate that AAVE-speaking users prefer Standard American English (SAE) chatbots, with higher levels of AAVE correlating with lower ratings for a variety of characteristics, including chatbot trustworthiness and role appropriateness. These results highlight the complexities of creating inclusive AI systems and underscore the need for further exploration of diversity to enhance human-computer interactions.

Leveraging Large Language Models for Automated Dialogue Analysis

Developing high-performing dialogue systems benefits from the automatic identification of undesirable behaviors in system responses. However, detecting such behaviors remains challenging, as it draws on a breadth of general knowledge and understanding of conversational practices. Although recent research has focused on building specialized classifiers for detecting specific dialogue behaviors, the behavior coverage is still incomplete and there is a lack of testing on real-world human-bot interactions. This paper investigates the ability of a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM), ChatGPT-3.5, to perform dialogue behavior detection for nine categories in real human-bot dialogues. We aim to assess whether ChatGPT can match specialized models and approximate human performance, thereby reducing the cost of behavior detection tasks. Our findings reveal that neither specialized models nor ChatGPT have yet achieved satisfactory results for this task, falling short of human performance. Nevertheless, ChatGPT shows promising potential and often outperforms specialized detection models. We conclude with an in-depth examination of the prevalent shortcomings of ChatGPT, offering guidance for future research to enhance LLM capabilities.