Dialogue based interfaces for universal access.

Conversation provides an excellent means of communication for almost all people. Consequently, a conversational interface is an excellent mechanism for allowing people to interact with systems. Conversational systems are an active research area, but a wide range of systems can be developed with current technology. More sophisticated interfaces can take considerable effort, but simple interfaces can be developed quite rapidly. This paper gives an introduction to the current state of the art of conversational systems and interfaces. It describes a methodology for developing conversational interfaces and gives an example of an interface for a state benefits web site. The paper discusses how this interface could improve access for a wide range of people, and how further development of this interface would allow a larger range of people to use the system and give them more functionality

Discursive psychology

Discursive psychology begins with psychology as it faces people living their lives. It studies how psychology is constructed, understood and displayed as people interact in everyday and more institutional situations. How does a speaker show that they are not prejudiced, while developing a damning version of an entire ethnic group? How are actions coordinated in a counselling session to manage the blame of the different parties for the relationship breakdown? How is upset displayed, understood and receipted in a call to a child protection helpline? Questions of this kind require us to understand the kinds of things that are 'psychological' for people as they act and interact in particular settings - families, workplaces and schools. And this in turn encourages us to respecify the very object psychology

Dialogue based interfaces for universal access.

Conversation provides an excellent means of communication for almost all people. Consequently, a conversational interface is an excellent mechanism for allowing people to interact with systems. Conversational systems are an active research area, but a wide range of systems can be developed with current technology. More sophisticated interfaces can take considerable effort, but simple interfaces can be developed quite rapidly. This paper gives an introduction to the current state of the art of conversational systems and interfaces. It describes a methodology for developing conversational interfaces and gives an example of an interface for a state benefits web site. The paper discusses how this interface could improve access for a wide range of people, and how further development of this interface would allow a larger range of people to use the system and give them more functionality

Coordinating in dialogue: Using compound contributions to join a party

PhDCompound contributions (CCs) – dialogue contributions that continue or complete an earlier contribution – are an important and common device conversational participants use to extend their own and each other’s turns. The organisation of these cross-turn structures is one of the defining characteristics of natural dialogue, and cross-person CCs provide the paradigm case of coordination in dialogue. This thesis combines corpus analysis, experiments and theoretical modelling to explore how CCs are used, their effects on coordination and implications for dialogue models. The syntactic and pragmatic distribution of CCs is mapped using corpora of ordinary and task-oriented dialogues. This indicates that the principal factors conditioning the distribution of CCs are pragmatic and that same- and cross-person CCs tend to occur in different contexts. In order to test the impact of CCs on other conversational participants, two experiments are presented. These systematically manipulate, for the first time, the occurrence of CCs in live dialogue using text-based communication. The results suggest that syntax does not directly constrain the interpretation of CCs, and the primary effect of a cross-person CC on third parties is to suggest to them a strong form of coordination or coalition has formed between the people producing the two parts of the CC. A third experiment explores the conditions under which people will produce a completion for a truncated turn. Manipulations of the structural and contextual predictability of the truncated turn show that while syntax provides a resource for the construction of a CC it does not place significant constraints on where the split point may occur. It also shows that people are more likely to produce continuations when they share common ground. An analysis using the Dynamic Syntax framework is proposed, which extends previous work to account for these findings, and limitations and further research possibilities are outlined

Producing Acoustic-Prosodic Entrainment in a Robotic Learning Companion to Build Learner Rapport

abstract: With advances in automatic speech recognition, spoken dialogue systems are assuming increasingly social roles. There is a growing need for these systems to be socially responsive, capable of building rapport with users. In human-human interactions, rapport is critical to patient-doctor communication, conflict resolution, educational interactions, and social engagement. Rapport between people promotes successful collaboration, motivation, and task success. Dialogue systems which can build rapport with their user may produce similar effects, personalizing interactions to create better outcomes. This dissertation focuses on how dialogue systems can build rapport utilizing acoustic-prosodic entrainment. Acoustic-prosodic entrainment occurs when individuals adapt their acoustic-prosodic features of speech, such as tone of voice or loudness, to one another over the course of a conversation. Correlated with liking and task success, a dialogue system which entrains may enhance rapport. Entrainment, however, is very challenging to model. People entrain on different features in many ways and how to design entrainment to build rapport is unclear. The first goal of this dissertation is to explore how acoustic-prosodic entrainment can be modeled to build rapport. Towards this goal, this work presents a series of studies comparing, evaluating, and iterating on the design of entrainment, motivated and informed by human-human dialogue. These models of entrainment are implemented in the dialogue system of a robotic learning companion. Learning companions are educational agents that engage students socially to increase motivation and facilitate learning. As a learning companion’s ability to be socially responsive increases, so do vital learning outcomes. A second goal of this dissertation is to explore the effects of entrainment on concrete outcomes such as learning in interactions with robotic learning companions. This dissertation results in contributions both technical and theoretical. Technical contributions include a robust and modular dialogue system capable of producing prosodic entrainment and other socially-responsive behavior. One of the first systems of its kind, the results demonstrate that an entraining, social learning companion can positively build rapport and increase learning. This dissertation provides support for exploring phenomena like entrainment to enhance factors such as rapport and learning and provides a platform with which to explore these phenomena in future work.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201

Local Alignment of Frame of Reference Assignment in English and Swedish Dialogue

In this paper we examine how people assign, interpret, negotiate and repair the frame of reference (FoR) in online text-based dialogues discussing spatial scenes in English and Swedish. We describe our corpus and data collection which involves a coordination experiment in which dyadic dialogue participants have to identify differences in their picture of a visual scene. As their perspectives of the scene are different, they must coordinate their FoRs in order to complete the task. Results show that participants do not align on a global FoR, but tend to align locally, for sub-portions (or particular conversational games) in the dialogue. This has implications for how dialogue systems should approach problems of FoR assignment – and what strategies for clarification they should implement

A Review of Verbal and Non-Verbal Human-Robot Interactive Communication

In this paper, an overview of human-robot interactive communication is presented, covering verbal as well as non-verbal aspects of human-robot interaction. Following a historical introduction, and motivation towards fluid human-robot communication, ten desiderata are proposed, which provide an organizational axis both of recent as well as of future research on human-robot communication. Then, the ten desiderata are examined in detail, culminating to a unifying discussion, and a forward-looking conclusion

Managing discourse in conversation during lessons of Polish as a foreign language

Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu „Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia”. Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00