Challenge: Dialog systems often output human-like responses, but some are impossible for a machine to say.
Approach: They collect ratings on the feasibility of 900 two-turn dialogs from 9 data sources . they build classifiers and explore how modeling configuration might affect output permissibly .
Outcome: The proposed model can be used to train human-like dialogs, but it is not anthropomorphic.

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Challenge: We analyze 2,500 phrasings related to the intent of “Are you a robot?” and 2,500 adversarially selected utterances to determine whether systems are non-human.
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From Pixels to Personas: Investigating and Modeling Self-Anthropomorphism in Human-Robot Dialogues (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: a recent study shows that robots display human-like characteristics in dialogues . this anthropomorphism raises concerns about the accuracy of AI and its capabilities .
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What is wrong with you?: Leveraging User Sentiment for Automatic Dialog Evaluation (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing metrics for dialog evaluation are trained on human annotations, which is cumbersome to collect.
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DialogBench: Evaluating LLMs as Human-like Dialogue Systems (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks only evaluate LLMs' abilities for task completion as assistant AI.
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Mirages. On Anthropomorphism in Dialogue Systems (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Automated dialogue systems are anthropomorphised by developers and personified by users.
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Understanding User Utterances in a Dialog System for Caregiving (2020.lrec-1)

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Challenge: a dialog system that can monitor the health status of seniors has a huge potential for solving the labor shortage in the caregiving industry in aging societies.
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Do Neural Dialog Systems Use the Conversation History Effectively? An Empirical Study (P19-1)

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Challenge: Neural generative models are becoming more popular when building conversational agents.
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Dehumanizing Machines: Mitigating Anthropomorphic Behaviors in Text Generation Systems (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies have focused on how text generation systems can lead to harmful outcomes such as over-reliance, emotional dependence, dehumanization, deception, or even physical harm.
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Real or Robotic? Assessing Whether LLMs Accurately Simulate Qualities of Human Responses in Human-LLM Dialogue (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent work has sought to use large language models to simulate human-human and human-LLM interactions.
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Toward Machine Interpreting: Lessons from Human Interpreting Studies (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Current speech translation systems are static and do not adapt to real-world situations in ways human interpreters do.
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