Five-Factor Model as a Predictor for Spoken Dialog Systems

Human behavior varies widely as does the design of spoken dialog systems (SDS). The search for predictors to match a user’s preference and efficiency for a specific dialog interface type in an SDS was the focus of this research. By using personality as described by the Five-Factor Method (FFM) and the Wizard of Oz technique for delivering three system initiatives of the SDS, participants interacted with each of the SDS initiatives in scheduling an airline flight. The three system initiatives were constructed as strict system, which did not allow the user control of the interaction; mixed system, which allowed the user some control of the interaction but with a system override; and user system, which allowed the user control of the interaction. In order to eliminate gender bias in using the FFM as the instrument, participants were matched in gender and age. Participants were 18 years old to 70 years old, passed a hearing test, had no disability that prohibited the use of the SDS, and were native English speakers. Participants completed an adult consent form, a 50-question personality assessment as described by the FFM, and the interaction with the SDS. Participants also completed a system preference indication form at the end of the interaction. Observations for efficiency were recorded on paper by the researcher. Although the findings did not show a definitive predictor for a SDS due to the small population sample, by using a multinomial regression approach to the statistical analysis, odds ratios of the data helped draw conclusions that support certain personality factors as important roles in a user’s preference and efficiency in choosing and using a SDS. This gives an area for future research. Also, the presumption that preference and efficiency always match was not supported by the results from two of the three systems. An additional area for future research was discovered in the gender data. Although not an initial part of the research, the data shows promise in predicting preference and efficiency for certain SDS. Future research is indicated

Comprehension and performance in second language acquisition : a study of second language learners' production of modified comprehensible output.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D95515 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Methods for the experimental study for conversation

Imperial Users onl

Drama for foreign language teaching

This thesis shows how drama, when used correctly, can significantly aid second language acquisition (SLA). It was inspired by my own experiences of English teaching, as a student and a teacher, in Japan. Chapter 1 deals with the current situation in Japan. It explains why, despite huge amounts of time and money devoted to English teaching, the majority of students leave school unable to speak the language. Chapter 2 establishes the conditions necessary for SLA to be effective. In chapter 3 the theory of drama in education is reviewed and conditions necessary for drama to be effective are noted. Comparison of these two sets of conditions found many similarities. Chapter 4 reviews existing drama resource books and suggests why they may fail to make the best use of drama with reference to the earlier chapters. Chapter 5 shows how the observations from the previous chapters can be put together to make SLA through drama fully effective. Chapter 6 expands this theme to give example lesson plans for teaching English in a Japanese Junior High School. Possibly the most important finding of this thesis is that there is a great deal of similarity between the conditions necessary for effective SLA and effective drama. In order to encourage language acquisition we have to ensure the high quality of the drama

Interactive Technologies for the Public Sphere Toward a Theory of Critical Creative Technology

Digital media cultural practices continue to address the social, cultural and aesthetic contexts of the global information economy, perhaps better called ecology, by inventing new methods and genres that encourage interactive engagement, collaboration, exploration and learning. The theoretical framework for creative critical technology evolved from the confluence of the arts, human computer interaction, and critical theories of technology. Molding this nascent theoretical framework from these seemingly disparate disciplines was a reflexive process where the influence of each component on each other spiraled into the theory and practice as illustrated through the Constructed Narratives project. Research that evolves from an arts perspective encourages experimental processes of making as a method for defining research principles. The traditional reductionist approach to research requires that all confounding variables are eliminated or silenced using methods of statistics. However, that noise in the data, those confounding variables provide the rich context, media, and processes by which creative practices thrive. As research in the arts gains recognition for its contributions of new knowledge, the traditional reductive practice in search of general principles will be respectfully joined by methodologies for defining living principles that celebrate and build from the confounding variables, the data noise. The movement to develop research methodologies from the noisy edges of human interaction have been explored in the research and practices of ludic design and ambiguity (Gaver, 2003); affective gap (Sengers et al., 2005b; 2006); embodied interaction (Dourish, 2001); the felt life (McCarthy & Wright, 2004); and reflective HCI (Dourish, et al., 2004). The theory of critical creative technology examines the relationships between critical theories of technology, society and aesthetics, information technologies and contemporary practices in interaction design and creative digital media. The theory of critical creative technology is aligned with theories and practices in social navigation (Dourish, 1999) and community-based interactive systems (Stathis, 1999) in the development of smart appliances and network systems that support people in engaging in social activities, promoting communication and enhancing the potential for learning in a community-based environment. The theory of critical creative technology amends these community-based and collaborative design theories by emphasizing methods to facilitate face-to-face dialogical interaction when the exchange of ideas, observations, dreams, concerns, and celebrations may be silenced by societal norms about how to engage others in public spaces. The Constructed Narratives project is an experiment in the design of a critical creative technology that emphasizes the collaborative construction of new knowledge about one's lived world through computer-supported collaborative play (CSCP). To construct is to creatively invent one's world by engaging in creative decision-making, problem solving and acts of negotiation. The metaphor of construction is used to demonstrate how a simple artefact - a building block - can provide an interactive platform to support discourse between collaborating participants. The technical goal for this project was the development of a software and hardware platform for the design of critical creative technology applications that can process a dynamic flow of logistical and profile data from multiple users to be used in applications that facilitate dialogue between people in a real-time playful interactive experience

Processing cost effects of atypicality inferences in a dual-task setup

Whether pragmatic inferences are cognitively more effortful than processing literal language has been a longstanding question in pragmatics. So far, experimental studies have exclusively tested generalized (scalar) implicatures. Current theories would predict that particularized implicatures should be cognitively effortful e however, this prediction has to date not been tested empirically. The present article contributes to the debate by investigating a specific type of particularized implicature, atypicality inferences, in a dualtask paradigm. In three experiments, we used either a non-linguistic (Experiment 1) or a linguistic (Experiments 2 and 3) secondary task, to modulate the amount of available cognitive resources. Our results show that the strength of pragmatic inferences is largely unaffected by the secondary task, which contrasts with prior predictions. We discuss the implications for traditional and modern accounts of pragmatic processing

Mechanisms underlying pre-school children’s syntactic, morphophonological and referential processing during language production

Much work has focused on how children learn the words and grammar of their language, with the emphasis being on how children learn to understand their native language. Little work has actually considered how children learn to speak that language and become active participants within their linguistic community. How do children formulate utterances? The primary aim of this thesis was to explore the morpho-phonological, syntactic and referential mechanisms underlying children’s language production. To do this, I used appropriately adapted experimental methods that have been successfully used to investigate the morpho-phonological, syntactic and referential mechanisms underlying adults’ language production. Experiments 1 and 2 investigated the syntactic and morpho-phonological encoding mechanisms underlying pre-schoolers’ (and adult controls’) production of simple sentences by tracking participants’ eye movements as they described arrays of two pictures of objects, one of which was preceded by a subliminal cue. In each experiment, we investigated syntactic encoding by analysing how participants chose their starting points, and investigated morpho-phonological encoding by analysing their eye movements as they named each picture. Overall, these experiments suggested that pre-schoolers’ syntactic and morpho-phonological processes are similar to those of adults in important respects. With respect to syntactic encoding, we found that pre-schoolers’ starting points were affected by our subliminal cue manipulation so that they tended to start their utterance with the cued object. These results suggest that children do not necessarily need to develop a structural plan before they begin lexical selection of a character or object name. With respect to morpho-phonological encoding, we found that pre-schoolers looked at each object in the order they mentioned them (i.e., they looked at the first object prior to naming it and shifted their gaze to the second object just before they began articulating the first object’s name), indicating that they were retrieving each word incrementally. However, pre-schoolers had longer gaze durations for their final word than their first word, indicating that it took longer for them to retrieve this word, whereas adults did not show this same effect. This could indicate that pre-schoolers are less efficient than adults when planning upcoming words whilst speaking. Finally, Experiments 3-8 explored referential mechanisms and examined how experience with a partner’s language use influenced children’s choice of perspective and associated referential expressions for objects (e.g., horse vs pony). Previous studies in adults have shown that interlocutors will flexibly adopt the same perspective as their partner, and have suggested that there are a range of mechanisms underlying this behaviour. The results from our experiments showed that children were more likely to use the same perspective (and associated choice of name) for an object if their partner had previously used that perspective, even when using that perspective meant overcoming a strong default preferred perspective (e.g., using pony instead of horse). However, children failed to maintain this tendency to reuse their partner’s perspective over time and contexts (E8). We argue that these results show that children’s choice of perspective and associated referential expressions can be influenced by their partner’s language use, but this effect is not long-lasting. Overall, our pattern of results is consistent with a strong influence of underlying priming mechanisms that facilitate lexical representations and associated perspectives during referential communication. Taken together, the results from our studies suggest that the underlying mechanisms of pre-schoolers’ language production (syntactic, morpho-phonological and referential encoding) are strikingly similar in important ways to those that have been found in adults (using very similar paradigms). However, our pattern of results indicates that pre-schoolers’ production abilities may be less efficient than adults, and as a result, their behaviour may be similar to that of adults under processing load. As a result, they may be particularly susceptible to influences of context (linguistic or non-linguistic) that facilitate retrieval processes. For example, they will immediately reuse a perspective their partner has previously used, but this effect will decay over time as the activation of their partner’s perspective decreases; or they will begin their utterance with a cued object name because the cue directs attention to one object which facilitates retrieval of that name. Overall, our results provide novel insight into the mechanisms underlying pre-schoolers’ online production

Blinking in Human Communicative Behaviour and it's Reproduction in Artificial Agents

A significant year-on-year rise in the creation and sales of personal and domestic robotic systems and the development of online embodied communicative agents (ECAs) has in parallel seen an increase in end-users from the public domain interacting with these systems. A number of these robotic/ECA systems are defined as social, whereby they are physically designed to resemble the bodily structure of a human and behaviorally designed to exist within human social surroundings. Their behavioural design is especially important with respect to communication as it is commonly stated that for any social robotic/ECA system to be truly useful within its role, it will need to be able to effectively communicate with its human users. Currently however, the act of a human user instructing a social robotic/ECA system to perform a task highlights many areas of contention in human communication understanding. Commonly, social robotic/ECA systems are embedded with either non-human-like communication interfaces or deficient imitative human communication interfaces, neither of which reach the levels of communicative interaction expected by human users, leading to communication difficulties which in turn create negative association with the social robotic/ECA system in its users. These communication issues lead to a strong requirement for the development of more effective imitative human communication behaviours within these systems. This thesis presents findings from our research into human non-verbal facial behaviour in communication. The objective of the work was to improve communication grounding between social robotic/ECA systems and their human users through the conceptual design of a computational system of human non-verbal facial behaviour (which in human-human communicative behaviour is shown to carry in the range of 55% of the intended semantic meaning of a transferred message) and the development of a highly accurate computational model of human blink behaviour and a computational model of physiological saccadic eye movement in human-human communication, enriching the human-like properties of the facial non-verbal communicative feedback expressed by the social robotic/ECA system. An enhanced level of interaction would likely be achieved, leading to increased empathic response from the user and an improved chance of a satisfactory communicative conclusion to a user’s task requirement instructions. The initial focus of the work was in the capture, transcription and analysis of common human non-verbal facial behavioural traits within human-human communication, linked to the expression of mental communicative states of understanding, uncertainty, misunderstanding and thought. Facial Non-Verbal behaviour data was collected and transcribed from twelve participants (six female) through a dialogue-based communicative interaction. A further focus was the analysis of blink co-occurrence with other traits of human-human communicative non-verbal facial behaviour and the capture of saccadic eye movement at common proxemic distances. From these data analysis tasks, the computational models of human blink behaviour and saccadic eye movement behaviour whilst listening / speaking within human-human communication were designed and then implemented within the LightHead social robotic system. Human-based studies on the perception of naïve users of the imitative probabilistic computational blink model performance on the LightHead robotic system are presented and the results discussed. The thesis concludes on the impact of the work along with suggestions for further studies towards the improvement of the important task of achieving seamless interactive communication between social robotic/ECA systems and their human users

A tale of autobiographical memory development: New Zealand style

Autobiographical memories are for specific, personal past events that are of significance to an individual (Nelson, 1993). The social interaction model of autobiographical memory proposes that children begin learning about the relevance of personal memories through talking about the past with adults (Fivush, 1991). The current study investigated relations over time between maternal reminiscing style and children's own developing memory style, both with and independently of their mothers, from when the children were 19 months old. Relations between attachment quality and maternal and child conversational variables were also examined. Fifty-eight mother-child dyads discussed unique past events when the children were 19, 25, 32, and 40 months old. In addition, children participated in experimenter-child interviews about unique past events when they were 25, 32, and 40 months old. Children's language skills were measured at each timepoint. The mother child attachment relationship was measured at the 19-month timepoint. The present research demonstrated that the developmental progression to children's independent verbal memory actually begins with children's early interest in participating in the conversations and maternal reminiscing style, which together elicit children's later shared memory elaborations. Subsequently, children's shared memory elaborations and maternal reminiscing style both contribute to children's later independent memory at approximate I y 3-1/2 years of age. The present results isolated children's early interest in reminiscing as a crucial factor in initiating the social aspect of autobiographical memory. In contrast, to previous research, the current study did not find support for a simple socialisation path from mother to child (e.g. Reese et al., 1993), but rather demonstrated that bidirectional influences are present from the onset of mother-child conversations about the past. The current study also examined the contribution that attachment status may have to the development of joint reminiscing. Securely attached children demonstrated a greater willingness to participate in these conversations about the past and subsequently produced more unique memory information in comparison to insecurely attached children. In conjunction with the first set of results, these findings indicate that attachment security may be important in the foundation of mother-child joint reminiscing. Finally, contingency analyses showed that mothers from securely attached dyads provided more memory question elaborations in response to children's indications that they were willing to participate in these conversations, in contrast to mothers from insecurely attached dyads who provided more repetitions. The most appropriate response to these placeholders would be to continue to provide information to assist children in co-constructing the event with the mother, rather than continuing to provide information that the child has already received. Overall, mothers from securely attached dyads appear to be structuring past event talk with their children in a manner that may be labelled as "sensitive" for this task. In summary, the current study addressed the idea that autobiographical memory development is essentially a collaborative process with children significantly contributing to the development of their own reminiscing style from its inception. A secure attachment relationship may also enable the progress of the development of joint reminiscing