An overview of the question-response system in American English conversation

This article, part of a 10 language comparative project on question–response sequences, discusses these sequences in American English conversation. The data are video-taped spontaneous naturally occurring conversations involving two to five adults. Relying on these data I document the basic distributional patterns of types of questions asked (polar, Q-word or alternative as well as sub-types), types of social actions implemented by these questions (e.g., repair initiations, requests for confirmation, offers or requests for information), and types of responses (e.g., repetitional answers or yes/no tokens). I show that declarative questions are used more commonly in conversation than would be suspected by traditional grammars of English and questions are used for a wider range of functions than grammars would suggest. Finally, this article offers distributional support for the idea that responses that are better “fitted” with the question are preferred

Type inference for conversation types

Trabalho apresentado no âmbito do Mestrado em Engenharia Informática, como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia InformáticaThis dissertation tackles the problem of type inference for conversation types by devising and implementing a type inference algorithm. This is an interesting issue to address if we take into account that service-oriented applications can have very rich and complex protocols of services’usage, thus requiring the programmer to annotate every service invocation with a type corresponding to his role in a protocol, which would make the development of such applications quite unpractical. Therefore, freeing the programmer from that task, by having inference of types that describe such protocols, is quite desirable not only because it is cumbersome and tedious to do such annotations but also because it reduces the occurrences of errors when developing real complex systems. While there is several work done related to session types and type inference in the context of binary sessions, work regarding multiparty conversations is still lacking even though there are some proposals related to multi-session conversations(i.e. interactions happen through shared channels that are distributed at service invocation time to all participants). Our approach is based on Conversation Calculus, a process calculus that models services’primitives based on conversations access point where all the interactions of a conversation take place. In order to test our type inference algorithm we designed and implemented a prototype of a proof of-concept distributed programming language based on Conversation Calculus. Finally, we show that our type inference algorithm is sound, complete, decidable and that it always returns a principal typing

Temporal Inferences in Conversation

Within this article, I explore how coproductions (expansions made by a second speaker upon a previous utterance) and questions regarding prior utterances work to verbalize inferences regarding the temporal information in spoken German conversation. While questions regarding prior utterances and coproductions are traditionally understood to have different communicative functions (signaling understanding/ misunderstanding; turn taking) to coproductions, empirical data shows how these expression types enable the speaker to gradually verbalize different strengths of assumption about details of the previous turn. These two expression types are not a dichotomy, but a continuum