NLP · Conversational AI · Dialogue Systems

About me

Hi! I’m Dawn, a PhD candidate at Utrecht University in the Software Technologies for Learning and Teaching group, supervised by Johan Jeuring and Albert Gatt. I hold an MSc in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) from Delft University of Technology.

My research focuses on conversational AI and dialogue systems for professional training simulations, particularly how LLMs can generate, evaluate, and provide feedback during role-playing interactions. My PhD project is conducted in collaboration with DialogueTrainer, with whom I am also affiliated. My work investigates how these systems can be designed to be reliable, effective, and intuitive for real-world settings.

Research

Emotion Model for Child Helpline Training Tool

Dongxu Lu, supervised by Mohammed Al Owayyed and Willem-Paul Brinkman

Master thesis

Description: We extend a counselling-training agent with an Emotion-BDI model that can simulate dynamic user emotional states to improve realism and engagement in simulated dialogues.

A label-oriented loss function for learning sentence representations

Yihong Liu, Wei Guan, Dongxu Lu, Xianchun Zou

Vol. 66, Computer Speech & Language

Description: We introduce a loss that uses label structure when training sentence encoders for text classification, so representations better reflect supervisory signal from the label space.

Nyan Cat © PRguitarman