Show Me You Care: Trait Empathy, Linguistic Style and Mimicry on Facebook

Linguistic mimicry, the adoption of another’s language patterns, is a subconscious behavior with pro-social benefits. However, some professions advocate its conscious use in empathic communication. This involves mutual mimicry; effective communicators mimic their interlocutors, who also mimic them back. Since mimicry has often been studied in face-to-face contexts, we ask whether individuals with empathic dis- positions have unique communication styles and/or elicit mimicry in mediated communication on Facebook. Participants completed Davis’ Interpersonal Reactivity Index and provided access to Facebook activity. We confirm that dispositional empathy is correlated to the use of particular stylistic features. In addition, we identify four empathy profiles and find correlations to writing style. When a linguistic feature is used, this often “triggers” use by friends. However, the presence of particular features, rather than participant dispo- sition, best predicts mimicry. This suggests that machine-human communications could be enhanced based on recently used features, without extensive user profiling

When to Say What and How: Adapting the Elaborateness and Indirectness of Spoken Dialogue Systems

With the aim of designing a spoken dialogue system which has the ability to adapt to the user's communication idiosyncrasies, we investigate whether it is possible to carry over insights from the usage of communication styles in human-human interaction to human-computer interaction. In an extensive literature review, it is demonstrated that communication styles play an important role in human communication. Using a multi-lingual data set, we show that there is a significant correlation between the communication style of the system and the preceding communication style of the user. This is why two components that extend the standard architecture of spoken dialogue systems are presented: 1) a communication style classifier that automatically identifies the user communication style and 2) a communication style selection module that selects an appropriate system communication style. We consider the communication styles elaborateness and indirectness as it has been shown that they influence the user's satisfaction and the user's perception of a dialogue. We present a neural classification approach based on supervised learning for each task. Neural networks are trained and evaluated with features that can be automatically derived during an ongoing interaction in every spoken dialogue system. It is shown that both components yield solid results and outperform the baseline in form of a majority-class classifier

Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation

This paper surveys the current state of the art in Natural Language Generation (NLG), defined as the task of generating text or speech from non-linguistic input. A survey of NLG is timely in view of the changes that the field has undergone over the past decade or so, especially in relation to new (usually data-driven) methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey therefore aims to (a) give an up-to-date synthesis of research on the core tasks in NLG and the architectures adopted in which such tasks are organised; (b) highlight a number of relatively recent research topics that have arisen partly as a result of growing synergies between NLG and other areas of artificial intelligence; (c) draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, relating them to similar challenges faced in other areas of Natural Language Processing, with an emphasis on different evaluation methods and the relationships between them.Comment: Published in Journal of AI Research (JAIR), volume 61, pp 75-170. 118 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl

Gender differences in navigation dialogues with computer systems

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Gender is among the most influential of the factors underlying differences in spatial abilities, human communication and interactions with and through computers. Past research has offered important insights into gender differences in navigation and language use. Yet, given the multidimensionality of these domains, many issues remain contentious while others unexplored. Moreover, having been derived from non-interactive, and often artificial, studies, the generalisability of this research to interactive contexts of use, particularly in the practical domain of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), may be problematic. At the same time, little is known about how gender strategies, behaviours and preferences interact with the features of technology in various domains of HCI, including collaborative systems and systems with natural language interfaces. Targeting these knowledge gaps, the thesis aims to address the central question of how gender differences emerge and operate in spatial navigation dialogues with computer systems. To this end, an empirical study is undertaken, in which, mixed-gender and same-gender pairs communicate to complete an urban navigation task, with one of the participants being under the impression that he/she interacts with a robot. Performance and dialogue data were collected using a custom system that supported synchronous navigation and communication between the user and the robot. Based on this empirical data, the thesis describes the key role of the interaction of gender in navigation performance and communication processes, which outweighed the effect of individual gender, moderating gender differences and reversing predicted patterns of performance and language use. This thesis has produced several contributions; theoretical, methodological and practical. From a theoretical perspective, it offers novel findings in gender differences in navigation and communication. The methodological contribution concerns the successful application of dialogue as a naturalistic, and yet experimentally sound, research paradigm to study gender and spatial language. The practical contributions include concrete design guidelines for natural language systems and implications for the development of gender-neutral interfaces in specific domains of HCI

Stylistic Creativity in the Utilization of Management Tools

We analyze the role of management instruments in the development of collective activity and in the dynamics of organization, recurring to pragmatic and semiotic theories. In dualist representation-based theories (rationalism, cognitivism), instruments are seen as symbolic reflections of situations, which enable actors to translate their complex concrete activities into computable models. In interpretation-based theories (pragmatism, theory of activity, situated cognition), instruments are viewed as signs interpreted by actors to make sense of their collective activity, in an ongoing and situated manner. Instruments combine objective artefacts and interpretive schemes of utilization. They constrain interpretation and utilization, but do not completely determine them: they define genus (generic classes) of collective activity, but they leave space for individual or local interpretive schemes and stylistic creation in using them. A major part of organizational dynamics takes place in the permanent interplay between instrumental genus and styles. Whereas representation-based theories can be acceptable approximations in stable and reasonably simple organizational settings, interpretation-based theories make uncertain and complex situations more intelligible. They view emotions and creativity as a key part of the interpretive process, rather than as external biases of a rational modelling process. For future research, we wish to study how interpretation-based theories should impact managerial practices and improve, not only intelligibility, but also actionability of instruments and situations.Collective Activity; Genus; Instruments; Interpretation; Management Instruments; Performance Management; Pragmatism; Semiotics; Style

Space doubt: the progression of spaces from Metropolis to The Matrix

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Inglês e Literatura Correspondente.The recent surge in cyberspace science fiction follows previous trends within the genre, i.e. those connected with future city-space and outer space, and is an inevitable result of economic forces. There has always been a close relationship between capitalism and spatial expansion, compelled by technological innovations that have opened spaces to exploration and exploitation. The most obvious examples are the locomotive and the automobile, both of which involved spatial domination and were impelled by capitalism. The diachronic progression of those technological advances has its counterpart in the development of capitalism itself, as pointed out by Frederic Jameson who, following Ernst Mandel, identifies three stages of capitalism with their corresponding cultural logics. Multinational capitalism, the current stage, has as its technological innovation the electronics and computer industries, which are markedly different from previous stages principally because the space involved, cyberspace, is intrinsic to the products themselves. Jameson asserts further that the cultural logic of this current stage is postmodernism and that any cultural output today takes place within the context of multinational capitalism. Previous technological innovations and their respective spatial dominants have also led to ontological uncertainties, a fact borne out by examining the corpus films that make up the bulk of this study. In the nearly 75 years that separate Metropolis from The Matrix, we have seen a succession of ontological shifts between humans and their technological offspring which indicate both persistent doubts about the role of technology and its possible encroachments on our own autonomy. This last is a further differentiation between the modernist perspective of technology as exemplified by Metropolis and postmodern attitudes revealed by The Matrix. If a shift within the science fiction genre is occurring, with cyberspace based fiction supplanting previous spaces, then the same capitalist forces that were at work in previous spatial dominants must be functioning as well. A fact brought out by the current research is the inevitable connection between capitalist forces and spatial exploration, augmented by the role of multinational corporations in the cultural output of today. While there have been numerous critical inquiries into the differences between modernism and postmodernism there has been little said about the progression of spaces between them. The current research is focused principally on space but an inevitable conclusion is that space cannot be separated from either technological advances or ontological uncertainties, whether in society in general or in the cultural output of a particular historical period

Proceedings of the 1st Doctoral Consortium at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (DC-ECAI 2020)

1st Doctoral Consortium at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (DC-ECAI 2020), 29-30 August, 2020 Santiago de Compostela, SpainThe DC-ECAI 2020 provides a unique opportunity for PhD students, who are close to finishing their doctorate research, to interact with experienced researchers in the field. Senior members of the community are assigned as mentors for each group of students based on the student’s research or similarity of research interests. The DC-ECAI 2020, which is held virtually this year, allows students from all over the world to present their research and discuss their ongoing research and career plans with their mentor, to do networking with other participants, and to receive training and mentoring about career planning and career option

Amoral Machines, Or: How Roboticists Can Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Law

The media and academic dialogue surrounding high-stakes decisionmaking by robotics applications has been dominated by a focus on morality. But the tendency to do so while overlooking the role that legal incentives play in shaping the behavior of profit-maximizing firms risks marginalizing the field of robotics and rendering many of the deepest challenges facing today’s engineers utterly intractable. This Essay attempts to both halt this trend and offer a course correction. Invoking Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s canonical analogy of the “bad man . . . who cares nothing for . . . ethical rules,” it demonstrates why philosophical abstractions like the trolley problem—in their classic framing—provide a poor means of understanding the real-world constraints robotics engineers face. Using insights gleaned from the economic analysis of law, it argues that profit-maximizing firms designing autonomous decisionmaking systems will be less concerned with esoteric questions of right and wrong than with concrete questions of predictive legal liability. Until such time as the conversation surrounding so-called “moral machines” is revised to reflect this fundamental distinction between morality and law, the thinking on this topic by philosophers, engineers, and policymakers alike will remain hopelessly mired. Step aside, roboticists—lawyers have this one