GROUNDING IN FACE-TO-FACE CONVERSATION: AN ETHNOGRAPHY STUDY

Grounding is the process of achieving mutual understanding or belief about what was said between participants in a conversation. Its role is of a paramount important in communication to succeed. This paper examines the models of grounding styles that commonly occur among the teens. The study employed qualitative approach to analyze specific utterances using Clark’s and Traum’s theories of grounding in communication. The research has shown the use of tag questions is less than the use of interrogative forms. The switch of topic dialogue from an uninformative to informative one is another grounding style that the respondents adopted

Conversation acts in task-oriented spoken dialogue

A linguistic form\u27s compositional, timeless meaning can be surrounded or even contradicted by various social, aesthetic, or analogistic companion meanings. This paper addresses a series of problems in the structure of spoken language discourse, including turn-taking and grounding. It views these processes as composed of fine-grained actions, which resemble speech acts both in resulting from a computational mechanism of planning and in having a rich relationship to the specific linguistic features which serve to indicate their presence. The resulting notion of Conversation Acts is more general than speech act theory, encompassing not only the traditional speech acts but turn-taking, grounding, and higher-level argumentation acts as well. Furthermore, the traditional speech acts in this scheme become fully joint actions, whose successful performance requires full listener participation. This paper presents a detailed analysis of spoken language dialogue. It shows the role of each class of conversation acts in discourse structure, and discusses how members of each class can be recognized in conversation. Conversation acts, it will be seen, better account for the success of conversation than speech act theory alone

Modelling Users, Intentions, and Structure in Spoken Dialog

We outline how utterances in dialogs can be interpreted using a partial first order logic. We exploit the capability of this logic to talk about the truth status of formulae to define a notion of coherence between utterances and explain how this coherence relation can serve for the construction of AND/OR trees that represent the segmentation of the dialog. In a BDI model we formalize basic assumptions about dialog and cooperative behaviour of participants. These assumptions provide a basis for inferring speech acts from coherence relations between utterances and attitudes of dialog participants. Speech acts prove to be useful for determining dialog segments defined on the notion of completing expectations of dialog participants. Finally, we sketch how explicit segmentation signalled by cue phrases and performatives is covered by our dialog model.Comment: 17 page

A Review of Verbal and Non-Verbal Human-Robot Interactive Communication

In this paper, an overview of human-robot interactive communication is presented, covering verbal as well as non-verbal aspects of human-robot interaction. Following a historical introduction, and motivation towards fluid human-robot communication, ten desiderata are proposed, which provide an organizational axis both of recent as well as of future research on human-robot communication. Then, the ten desiderata are examined in detail, culminating to a unifying discussion, and a forward-looking conclusion

Goals in Discourse - From Actions to Rhetorical Relations

This book provides a better understanding of rhetorical relations and their impact on the referent's abilities to serve as non-local antecedents for referential expressions. It argues that rhetorical relations rather relate speech acts than semantic denotations of sentences, which emphasizes the action theoretic character of communication and which makes it possible to describe and understand rhetorical relations for non-assertive speech acts. The arguments in this book are based on some cognitive and action theoretical assumptions which help to model a hearer's recognition of the speaker's communicative plans, which is believed to be the unrealized discourse structure. In particular, the common sense principle of inertia is used, which models the general assumption that agents believe that things in the world do not change if there is no reason for them to change. Based on this principle, it is possible to explain why acceptance moves in dialog are necessary for communication and, moreover, why by default, two speech acts are related by a support relation, i.e. by a relation where one speech act supports the goal of the speech act it is related to. Support relations are described as a further class of rhetorical relations that, roughly, correspond to subordinating relations but, in contrast to subordinating relations, have the advantage that it is possible to provide an intrinsic definition. Finally, it is shown how discourse structure as an impact on the prominence status of referents and speech acts, being roughly the ability of referents to serve as structural anchor for further communication

Deconstructing Questions: Reanalyzing a heterogenous class of speech acts via commitment and engagement

Direct and indirect characterizations of the relation between clause type (syntactic form) and speech act (pragmatic function) are problematic because they map oversimplified forms onto decomposable functions. We propose an alternative account of questions by abandoning any (in)direct link to their clause type and by decomposing speech acts into two variables encoding propositional attitudes. One variable captures the speaker’s commitment to an utterance, another their expectation toward the addressee’s engagement. We couch this proposal in a syntactic framework that relies on two projections dedicated to managing common ground (GroundP) and managing turn-taking (ResponseP), respectively. Empirical evidence comes from the conversational properties of sentence-final intonation in English and sentence-peripheral particles that serve to manage the common ground

Collaborating on Referring Expressions

This paper presents a computational model of how conversational participants collaborate in order to make a referring action successful. The model is based on the view of language as goal-directed behavior. We propose that the content of a referring expression can be accounted for by the planning paradigm. Not only does this approach allow the processes of building referring expressions and identifying their referents to be captured by plan construction and plan inference, it also allows us to account for how participants clarify a referring expression by using meta-actions that reason about and manipulate the plan derivation that corresponds to the referring expression. To account for how clarification goals arise and how inferred clarification plans affect the agent, we propose that the agents are in a certain state of mind, and that this state includes an intention to achieve the goal of referring and a plan that the agents are currently considering. It is this mental state that sanctions the adoption of goals and the acceptance of inferred plans, and so acts as a link between understanding and generation.Comment: 32 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Computation Linguistics 21-

Impoliteness of Directive Speech Acts in Online Indonesian Language Learning

This study aims to describe the impoliteness of directive speech acts in online Indonesian language learning. The data collection technique in this study used the observation, note, and record technique. The object of this research was the analysis of directive speech act impoliteness. The data analysis technique used in this study was a data triangulation model. The study results indicate an impoliteness of directive speech acts on Indonesian language learning conducted by the teacher. The teacher unintentionally performed impoliteness on the directive speech acts. The first data found that the teacher asked all the students to pay attention impolitely. The second data showed that the teacher as a speaker prohibits students from taking attendance. The third data showed that the teacher used the impolite directive speech acts when saying the utter "unnecessary" and "you pay less attention" to the students who forgot to attend the class. The data (3a) above includes the impoliteness of the directive speech act of the requesting because it does not contain politeness elements that can smooth speech. Data (4a) The teacher asks students who are not members to leave the WhatsApp group, but the teacher does not use soft sentences. Data (5a) stated that the teacher instructs the students to cut the paper using a cutter and make lines on it . Next, the data (5b) stated the teacher asks students to look at the learning material using impoliteness directive speech acts. Data (5c) stated that the teacher instructs students not to forget to fill the attendance. Data (6a) stated the teacher asks students to join the google classroom but does not use polite sentences. The data includes the directive speech act of the requesting marked with the word beg. Data (7a) Teachers require students to have sufficient quotas when participating in learning Indonesian online. Keywords: impoliteness, directive speech acts, Online learnin

A debate dashboard to enhance on-line knowledge sharing

Purpose – Web 2.0 technologies have radically modified the way in which knowledge is created, managed and shared, improving productivity and accelerating innovation processes for the enterprises. These technologies have allowed enterprises to produce knowledge, leverage collective intelligence and build social capital on a scale that was unimaginable a few years ago. In this paper we focus on a particular kind of web-based collaborative platforms known as argument mapping tools and we discuss the main barriers to the adoption of them. Literature has proved that these argument mapping tools provide large and small and medium enterprise with several advantages, but nevertheless, they have low level adoption. In this paper we explore new technological solutions to support the adoption of argument mapping tools. In particular, we propose the design of a Debate Dashboard to provide visual feedback to support online deliberation. These visual feedback aims at compensating the loss of information due to the mediation of the technology. The Debate Dashboard is composed of a set of suitable visualization tools that have been selected on the basis of a literature review of the visualization tools. Design/methodology/approach - We propose a literature review of existing visualization tools. Building on the literature review we selected thirty visualization tools, which have been classified on the basis of the kind of feedback they are able to provide. We identify three classes of feedback: Community feedback (identikit of users), Interaction feedback (about how users interact) and Absorption feedback (about generated content and its organization). We distilled the Debate Dashboard features by building on results of a literature review on Web 2.0 tools for data visualization. As output of literature review we selected six visualization tools. We consider these selected tools as a sort of starting point. Indeed, our aim is the improvement of them through the addition of further features and functions in order to make them more effective in providing feedback. Originality/value – Our paper enriches the debate about computer mediated conversation and visualization tools. We propose a Dashboard prototype to augment collaborative knowledge mapping tools by providing visual feedback on conversations. The Dashboard will provide at the same time three different kinds of feedback about: details of the participants to the conversation, interaction processes and generated content. This will allow the improvement of the benefits and reduce the costs deriving from the use of mapping tools. Moreover, another important novelty is that visualization tools will be integrated to mapping tools, as until now they have been used only to visualize data contained in forums (as Usenet or Slash.dot), chat or email archives Practical implications – The Dashboard provides feedback about participants, interaction processes and generated contents, thus supporting the adoption of mapping tools as technologies able to foster knowledge sharing among remote workers or/and customers and supplier. The integration of Debate Dashboard with common online argument mapping tools aims at enabling the following advantages: 1. Reduction of misunderstanding; 2. Reduction of cognitive effort required to use argument mapping tools; 3. Improvement of the exploration and the analysis of the maps - the Debate Dashboard feedback improves the usability of the object (the map), thus allowing users to pitch into the conversation in the right place