Functions of Silences towards Information Flow in Spoken Conversation.

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IS SILENCE GOLDEN? CONVERSATIONS OF NATIVE SPEAKERS OF RIMI IN SINGIDA- TANZANIA

This paper provides an empirical examination of the perception of silence as a communicative act in a Rimi cultural context. Four casual conversations with Rimi native speakers were examined.  Silence in conversation was determined using a turn-taking framework in Conversation Analysis previously described by Sacks et al. (1974) as a turn-taking organization.  Native speakers of Rimi like people in other cultures have beliefs and myths regarding silence. However, these cultural artifacts are often hardly reflected in their real conversation practice. Rimi's belief regarding the value of silence dictates avoidance of silence because they consider it a danger and veiled bad intentions. Despite this cultural orientation regarding silence, in some contexts, Rimi native speakers give it a positive value. The findings show that silence can be used for terminating a topic, showing agreement, and indicating emotions such as sadness. Silence therefore can lead to either harmonious or troubled conversation at the same time. Many prolific studies have shown that Eastern cultures appreciate silence while the Western cultures silence is attributed to incompetence and lack of willingness to participate in communication. This cultural dichotomy regarding the perception of silence between Western and Eastern cultures gives an impression that cultures can either perceive silence positively or negatively. Data from this study show that this understanding is faulty. The data indicate that silence cannot be described categorically as solely positively or negatively perceived in a particular culture; instead, it should be viewed as a variable entity within a single cultural group

Computational modeling of turn-taking dynamics in spoken conversations

The study of human interaction dynamics has been at the center for multiple research disciplines in- cluding computer and social sciences, conversational analysis and psychology, for over decades. Recent interest has been shown with the aim of designing computational models to improve human-machine interaction system as well as support humans in their decision-making process. Turn-taking is one of the key aspects of conversational dynamics in dyadic conversations and is an integral part of human- human, and human-machine interaction systems. It is used for discourse organization of a conversation by means of explicit phrasing, intonation, and pausing, and it involves intricate timing. In verbal (e.g., telephone) conversation, the turn transitions are facilitated by inter- and intra- speaker silences and over- laps. In early research of turn-taking in the speech community, the studies include durational aspects of turns, cues for turn yielding intention and lastly designing turn transition modeling for spoken dia- log agents. Compared to the studies of turn transitions very few works have been done for classifying overlap discourse, especially the competitive act of overlaps and function of silences. Given the limitations of the current state-of-the-art, this dissertation focuses on two aspects of con- versational dynamics: 1) design automated computational models for analyzing turn-taking behavior in a dyadic conversation, 2) predict the outcome of the conversations, i.e., observed user satisfaction, using turn-taking descriptors, and later these two aspects are used to design a conversational profile for each speaker using turn-taking behavior and the outcome of the conversations. The analysis, experiments, and evaluation has been done on a large dataset of Italian call-center spoken conversations where customers and agents are engaged in real problem-solving tasks. Towards solving our research goal, the challenges include automatically segmenting and aligning speakers’ channel from the speech signal, identifying and labeling the turn-types and its functional aspects. The task becomes more challenging due to the presence of overlapping speech. To model turn- taking behavior, the intension behind these overlapping turns needed to be considered. However, among all, the most critical question is how to model observed user satisfaction in a dyadic conversation and what properties of turn-taking behavior can be used to represent and predict the outcome. Thus, the computational models for analyzing turn-taking dynamics, in this dissertation includes au- tomatic segmenting and labeling turn types, categorization of competitive vs non-competitive overlaps, silences (e.g., lapse, pauses) and functions of turns in terms of dialog acts. The novel contributions of the work presented here are to 1. design of a fully automated turn segmentation and labeling (e.g., agent vs customer’s turn, lapse within the speaker, and overlap) system. 2. the design of annotation guidelines for segmenting and annotating the speech overlaps with the competitive and non-competitive labels. 3. demonstrate how different channels of information such as acoustic, linguistic, and psycholin- guistic feature sets perform in the classification of competitive vs non-competitive overlaps. 4. study the role of speakers and context (i.e., agents’ and customers’ speech) for conveying the information of competitiveness for each individual feature set and their combinations. 5. investigate the function of long silences towards the information flow in a dyadic conversation. The extracted turn-taking cues is then used to automatically predict the outcome of the conversation, which is modeled from continuous manifestations of emotion. The contributions include 1. modeling the state of the observed user satisfaction in terms of the final emotional manifestation of the customer (i.e., user). 2. analysis and modeling turn-taking properties to display how each turn type influence the user satisfaction. 3. study of how turn-taking behavior changes within each emotional state. Based on the studies conducted in this work, it is demonstrated that turn-taking behavior, specially competitiveness of overlaps, is more than just an organizational tool in daily human interactions. It represents the beneficial information and contains the power to predict the outcome of the conversation in terms of satisfaction vs not-satisfaction. Combining the turn-taking behavior and the outcome of the conversation, the final and resultant goal is to design a conversational profile for each speaker. Such profiled information not only facilitate domain experts but also would be useful to the call center agent in real time. These systems are fully automated and no human intervention is required. The findings are po- tentially relevant to the research of overlapping speech and automatic analysis of human-human and human-machine interactions

Italian via email: From an online project of learning and teaching towards the development of a multi‐cultural discourse community

This paper seeks to illustrate how the use of Internet resources (specifically email and the Web) can affect and enhance language learning and cultural understanding, modify the learning environment, reduce the barriers which time, space and societal differences may create, be a source of motivation, and redefine the role of teachers and learners. Although it is based on an on‐going project, it already provides practical evidence of some advantages email and Internet resources can bring to the language learner and to the teacher. A detailed evaluation of the language outcomes is under way, but incomplete at the time of writing. This paper is nevertheless more concerned with other variables of language learning and teaching which the author considers fundamental to reach a successful degree of language use

Šutnja straha, strahom utišano i strah od šutnje

Although the aim of this paper is primarily to provide a theoretical contribution to our understanding of silence, it is also based on an ethnographic study conducted in Lika, a region of Croatia marked by a history of conflict and violence. Silence, in addition to having diverse functions and effects, is also characterised by different durations (it can be measured in seconds as well as in decades). It can be, and often is, filled with other potentially communicable non-verbal aspects (emotions and affects, gestures, sounds, etc.). It can also be more or less dependent on – and even steered by – the opinions, experiences and viewpoints of other individuals and communities. In short, this paper deals with the silences found in the course of the research within the framework of numerous typologies of silence, focusing on contextually dependent and ambivalent effects of silence, its “emptiness”, duration and actors (both individuals and communities). This paper deals with silences and silencing at the macrolevel (which includes their affective and social functions), as well as their effect at the microlevel of interpersonal interaction, everyday life and fieldwork encounters. The effects of the network of silences on the public presentation of the findings resulting from studying silence will also be discussed.Iako je rad zamišljen kao teorijski prilog razumijevanju različitih praksi šutnje koje su povezane s poviješću konflikta i nasilja, on se temelji na istraživanju koje je provedeno u Lici, hrvatskoj regiji koju autorica prepoznaje kao lokalitet koji je rezervoar strahova, anksioznosti, trauma i njima pripadajućih šutnji s dugom povijesti. Osim što šutnja ima različite funkcije i učinke, ona ima i vrlo raznoliku trajnost (može se mjeriti sekundama, ali i desetljećima), može biti i često jest popunjena drugim potencijalno komunikabilnim neverbalnim aspektima (emocijama i afektima, gestama, zvukovima i sl.) te može biti više ili manje ovisna o mišljenjima, iskustvima i stavovima drugih pojedinaca i zajednica te upravljana njima. Ukratko, u tekstu se šutnje zabilježene tijekom istraživanja promatraju u okviru brojnih tipologija šutnje te se pomnije razmatraju kontekstualno ovisni i ambivalentni učinci šutnje, njezine “praznine”, trajanje i njezini akteri (pojedinci i zajednice). U tekstu se raspravlja o šutnjama i utišavanjima na makrorazini te njihovim afektivnim i društvenim funkcijama kao i o njihovim učincima na mikrorazini u interpersonalnim interakcijama i svakodnevnom životu, etnografskim susretima. Raspravlja se i o reperkusijama mreže šutnji na javnu prezentaciju rezultata istraživanja šutnje

Hesitations in Spoken Dialogue Systems

Betz S. Hesitations in Spoken Dialogue Systems. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2020

Turning Their Talk: Gendered Conversation in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

Turning Their Talk investigates the pressures placed upon female characters’ communication styles as they enter the heterosexual market in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Villette, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. The title of this dissertation derives from a phrase found in each the six novels I examine--“she turned the conversation”—to suggest the subtle control female characters exercise through speech that allows them to achieve tangible forms of social agency. My dissertation argues that novelistic representations of speech mirror the paradoxical roles women historically faced as they balanced societal ideals for feminine conduct, the companionate marriage, and the increasingly popular principles attached to liberal individualism. By identifying the historical norms of speech imposed upon women of the nineteenth-century and applying that information to the dialogue of female characters to examine the ways in which they follow, challenge, subvert, and constitute those norms in specific contexts within the novel, my work illustrates how speech, as a cultural resource and practice, enacts social action and personal authority. In each chapter, I identify the most statistically distinct forms of speech assigned to female characters—forms substantiated through corpus linguistic methodology. These patterns reveal how fictional identities become constructed, power is translated into relationships, and gender ideology takes shape through spoken words. This project breaks away from a long-standing tradition in women’s literary criticism that equates one’s “voice” with individual power and, instead, demonstrates how different female characters similarly work within a system of language subject to institutional and ideological constraints to socially maneuver without upending the normative rules governing gender difference

Meaning between, in, and around words, gestures and postures: multimodal meaning making in children's classroom communication

The view of language from a social semiotic perspective is clear. Language is one of many semiotic resources we employ in our communicative practices. That is to say that while language is at times dominant, it always operates within a multimodal frame and furthermore, at times modes other than language are dominant. The proposed 2014 National Curriculum for the UK, on the other hand, values pupils' face-to-face classroom interaction in terms of standard spoken English (i.e. in terms of the mode of language alone). This paper offers examples demonstrating how embodied modes such as gesture, posture, facial expression, gaze and haptics work in conjunction with speech in children's collaborative construction of knowledge. In other words, what may have been previously conceived as gaps and silences - often interpreted as an absence of language - are in fact instantiations of the work of semiotic modes other than language. In order to consider this closely, this paper offers evidence from a multimodal micro-analysis of pupil-to-pupil, face-to-face interaction in one science lesson in a Year Five UK Primary classroom. It demonstrates how children's meaning-making is achieved through apt use of all available semiotic resources