A Personalized System for Conversational Recommendations

Searching for and making decisions about information is becoming increasingly difficult as the amount of information and number of choices increases. Recommendation systems help users find items of interest of a particular type, such as movies or restaurants, but are still somewhat awkward to use. Our solution is to take advantage of the complementary strengths of personalized recommendation systems and dialogue systems, creating personalized aides. We present a system -- the Adaptive Place Advisor -- that treats item selection as an interactive, conversational process, with the program inquiring about item attributes and the user responding. Individual, long-term user preferences are unobtrusively obtained in the course of normal recommendation dialogues and used to direct future conversations with the same user. We present a novel user model that influences both item search and the questions asked during a conversation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in significantly reducing the time and number of interactions required to find a satisfactory item, as compared to a control group of users interacting with a non-adaptive version of the system

Factors related to the rejection and/or abandonment of AAC devices

More than 3.5 million Americans have such significant communication disability that they cannot rely on their natural speech to meet their communication needs. As a result, these individuals are severely restricted in their participation in all aspects of life, including their education, employment, family, and community. Augmentative and alternative communication strategies offer great potential to enhance the communication of individuals with complex communication needs, and therefore improve their quality of life. Fifty-two ISAAC members that responded to the online survey utilized a 5 point Likert-type scale (strongly agree to strongly disagree) to rate the importance of factors as they relate to the rejection and/or abandonment. The mean values of ratings were calculated to determine which factors were cited as relevant in predicting AAC device rejection and abandonment. Additionally, an independent T-test was utilized to determine if the factors cited varied depending on the role of the person completing the survey. The results of this investigation indicate that it is imperative to consider a complex interaction of factors pertaining to the individuals who use AAC, their conversational partners, settings in which interactions occur, and devices used to interact, when designing an AAC intervention. The statistical analysis revealed no significance difference in how the respondents rated the factors based on their occupation. Based on the results of the study, a checklist of factors that an AAC practitioner might consider addressing in order to foster acceptance of AAC systems initially and later on was constructed

The management of conversational topic by a ten year old child with pragmatic difficulties

A case study is presented of a ten year old child described as having 'pragmatic difficulties', for the initiation and management of conversational topic. Video-recorded naturallyoccurring conversations between the child and his peers at school are subjected to a detailed sequential analysis, drawing on some of the insights gained into the collaborative management of topic by researchers working in the tradition of conversation analysis (Button and Casey 1984, 1985). We find that our subject uses some helpful devices to generate and manage conversational topics but has difficulty collaborating with his conversational partners. We consider some of the different ways in which social-cognitive abilities are implicated in alternative courses of action available for the initiation and management of topic, and find that our subject's behaviours support the suggestion of Bishop (1997) that a difficulty in the development of social cognition underlies the interactional problems experienced by children with pragmatic language impairment. Consideration is given to ways in which the child's conversational behaviours are subject to influence from the styles of talk he is exposed to in interactions with adults in the language unit setting in which he spends much of his time

Meetings and Meeting Modeling in Smart Environments

In this paper we survey our research on smart meeting rooms and its relevance for augmented reality meeting support and virtual reality generation of meetings in real time or off-line. The research reported here forms part of the European 5th and 6th framework programme projects multi-modal meeting manager (M4) and augmented multi-party interaction (AMI). Both projects aim at building a smart meeting environment that is able to collect multimodal captures of the activities and discussions in a meeting room, with the aim to use this information as input to tools that allow real-time support, browsing, retrieval and summarization of meetings. Our aim is to research (semantic) representations of what takes place during meetings in order to allow generation, e.g. in virtual reality, of meeting activities (discussions, presentations, voting, etc.). Being able to do so also allows us to look at tools that provide support during a meeting and at tools that allow those not able to be physically present during a meeting to take part in a virtual way. This may lead to situations where the differences between real meeting participants, human-controlled virtual participants and (semi-) autonomous virtual participants disappear

THE IMPLICATURE AND VIOLATION OF MAXIMS IN INDONESIAN ADVERTISEMENTS

We all know that advertising is a business in which language is used to persuade people to do things (e.g., buy some product) and / or believe things (believing that the value of the product is trustworthy or a good one). The phenomenon, however, is that we tend to doubtthe truth conditions of the advertisements. In other words, we do not take those ads seriously. We are not very affected emotionally yet we are just amused and regard them as entertaining fallacies (e.g. the “AXE” male perfume). Some reasons might verify this fact. However, this paper is just concerned with the language phenomenon existing in theadvertisement world. A common shared perspective on the advertisement language within Indonesian ads is, among others, bombastic, hyperbolic, and many times, irrational. Not the least, most of the ads have a similar tendency to “violate” the language as long as theproduct sells. Apparently, Indonesian ads are apt to employ indirect language(‘implicature’) in their emulating their own product and devaluing their competitor’s product (e.g. the then Yahama’s “Yang Lain Makin Ketinggalan”). Upon these intriguing facts, this paper attempts to highlight general features of Indonesian advertisements in termsof (1) the violation of Grice’s conversational maxims (rules and norms) and (2) implicature(extended meaning). Alternating a more ‘acceptable’ model of ads could be a by-product ofthis paper