Designing Service-Oriented Chatbot Systems Using a Construction Grammar-Driven Natural Language Generation System

Service oriented chatbot systems are used to inform users in a conversational manner about a particular service or product on a website. Our research shows that current systems are time consuming to build and not very accurate or satisfying to users. We find that natural language understanding and natural language generation methods are central to creating an e�fficient and useful system. In this thesis we investigate current and past methods in this research area and place particular emphasis on Construction Grammar and its computational implementation. Our research shows that users have strong emotive reactions to how these systems behave, so we also investigate the human computer interaction component. We present three systems (KIA, John and KIA2), and carry out extensive user tests on all of them, as well as comparative tests. KIA is built using existing methods, John is built with the user in mind and KIA2 is built using the construction grammar method. We found that the construction grammar approach performs well in service oriented chatbots systems, and that users preferred it over other systems

Learning lessons from five student paramedics within their exposure to suicide: a critical narrative study

A Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the Professional Doctorate in Health and Wellbeing at the University of Wolverhampton.Background A suicide loss leaves behind a ripple effect of exposure and sense-making. Postvention research and practice has in part focused on professional/occupational exposure. However, it appears to have largely neglected paramedic science and emerging professional/occupational contexts for students who are studying a Higher Education course in allied health professions. Methodology The study design is methodologically grounded in the narrative method. The stories of five student paramedics who self-identified as experiencing exposure to suicide in their emerging professional/occupational context were collected. Positioned as socially co-constructed, and emerging in a post-structuralist world, this narrative inquiry then becomes a critical narrative study. A collocation of sense-making emerges within the discussions and places the students’ narrations side-by-side with the wider discourse and discursive practices which surround and construct professional/occupational suicide exposure, which are then analysed through a Foucauldian lens. Findings Having engaged in a critical interpretive synthesis of the background literature, this thesis has exposed how professional/occupational suicide exposure research is constructed as a problem. Expanding this body of knowledge, the student paramedics’ experiences and sense-making are presented within this study against an emergent plot line of voyage and return, travelling through themes of anticipation, initial fascination, frustration, nightmare, and return, and offer a form of oral history and co-constructed sense-making. These themes are merged and held against a narrative plot line and depicts a metaphor of multiple journeys. The concluding chapter offers an evocative and poetic representation of this metaphor, which has the capacity to bridge concepts, and to extend imagination into recognising new possibilities that emerge from the lessons our student paramedics offer. Possibilities Other avenues of research as well as paramedic science pedagogic possibilities emerge from this study, such as a decision to focus on allied health professional students studying in a Higher Education and placement learning context when exploring suicide exposure. Narrative as a way of knowing, would see us move away from a research and pedagogic approach that simply imparts knowledge of an accepted culture to the next generation of professionals. More so, a student paramedics education should offer sufficient time, space, and place to critically evaluate, to develop better knowledge of themselves and their contexts so that they can participate in that professional/occupational space to transform it. The augmented theoretical and conceptual model that is constructed within this critical narrative study, could be adopted within any study focus or topic of inquiry