Determining what people feel and think when interacting with humans and machines

Any interactive software program must interpret the users’ actions and come up with an appropriate response that is intelligable and meaningful to the user. In most situations, the options of the user are determined by the software and hardware and the actions that can be carried out are unambiguous. The machine knows what it should do when the user carries out an action. In most cases, the user knows what he has to do by relying on conventions which he may have learned by having had a look at the instruction manual, having them seen performed by somebody else, or which he learned by modifying a previously learned convention. Some, or most, of the times he just finds out by trial and error. In user-friendly interfaces, the user knows, without having to read extensive manuals, what is expected from him and how he can get the machine to do what he wants. An intelligent interface is so-called, because it does not assume the same kind of programming of the user by the machine, but the machine itself can figure out what the user wants and how he wants it without the user having to take all the trouble of telling it to the machine in the way the machine dictates but being able to do it in his own words. Or perhaps by not using any words at all, as the machine is able to read off the intentions of the user by observing his actions and expressions. Ideally, the machine should be able to determine what the user wants, what he expects, what he hopes will happen, and how he feels

Assessing relevance

This paper advances an approach to relevance grounded on patterns of material inference called argumentation schemes, which can account for the reconstruction and the evaluation of relevance relations. In order to account for relevance in different types of dialogical contexts, pursuing also non-cognitive goals, and measuring the scalar strength of relevance, communicative acts are conceived as dialogue moves, whose coherence with the previous ones or the context is represented as the conclusion of steps of material inferences. Such inferences are described using argumentation schemes and are evaluated by considering 1) their defeasibility, and 2) the acceptability of the implicit premises on which they are based. The assessment of both the relevance of an utterance and the strength thereof depends on the evaluation of three interrelated factors: 1) number of inferential steps required; 2) the types of argumentation schemes involved; and 3) the implicit premises required

Comprehensibility and the basic structures of dialogue

The study of what makes utterances difficult or easy to understand is one of the central topics of research in comprehension. It is both theoretically attractive and useful in practice. The more we know about difficulties in understanding the more we know about understanding. And the better we grasp typical problems of understanding in certain types of discourse and for certain recipients the better we can overcome these problems and the better we can advise people whose job it is to overcome such problems. It is therefore not surprising that comprehensibility has been the object of much reflection as far back as the days of classical rhetoric and that it is a center of lively interest in several present-day scientific disciplines, ranging from artificial intelligence and educational psychology to linguistics

Translation as a mediating activity: the influence of translation metaphors in research, practise and training of community interpreting

Entre las metáforas que muchos autores han utilizado para describir la traducción está la de la mediación. Una ojeada a la bibliografía publicada en las últimas décadas sobre interpretación en los servicios públicos nos permite comprobar hasta qué punto esa visión del intérprete como mediador está presente en muchas de las obras escritas al respecto. La idea de que el papel del intérprete no se reduce únicamente a la de reproductor de enunciados lingüísticos se halla latente en muchos de ellos. En este artículo, pretendemos analizar la influencia de esta metáfora de la mediación en las propuestas realizadas por los investigadores de este ámbito y comprobar cuál ha sido su repercusión en la investigación, la práctica y la docencia.G.I. HUM 767 (ayudas a Grupos de Investigación de la Junta de Andalucía) / Editorial Comares (colección interlingua

Virtual Meeting Rooms: From Observation to Simulation

Much working time is spent in meetings and, as a consequence, meetings have become the subject of multidisciplinary research. Virtual Meeting Rooms (VMRs) are 3D virtual replicas of meeting rooms, where various modalities such as speech, gaze, distance, gestures and facial expressions can be controlled. This allows VMRs to be used to improve remote meeting participation, to visualize multimedia data and as an instrument for research into social interaction in meetings. This paper describes how these three uses can be realized in a VMR. We describe the process from observation through annotation to simulation and a model that describes the relations between the annotated features of verbal and non-verbal conversational behavior.\ud As an example of social perception research in the VMR, we describe an experiment to assess human observers’ accuracy for head orientation

Interlocutors-Related and Hearer-Specific Causes of Misunderstanding: Processing Strategy, Confirmation Bias and Weak Vigilance

Noises, similarities between words, slips of the tongue, ambiguities, wrong or false beliefs, lexical deficits, inappropriate inferences, cognitive overload, non-shared knowledge, topic organisation or focusing problems, among others, may cause misunderstanding. While some of these are structural factors, others pertain to the speaker or to both the speaker and the hearer. In addition to stable factors connected with the interlocutors′ communicative abilities, cultural knowledge or patterns of thinking, other less stable factors, such as their personal relationships, psychological states or actions motivated by physiological functions, may also result in communicative problems. This paper considers a series of further factors that may eventually lead to misunderstanding, and which solely pertain to the hearer: processing strategy, confirmation bias and weak vigilance

Critical Analysis of Social Processes and Goal Orientation in an Online Financial Community

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