1,543 research outputs found
Designing for Harm Reduction: Communication Repair for Multicultural Users' Voice Interactions
Voice assistants' inability to serve people-of-color and non-native English
speakers has largely been documented as a quality-of-service harm. However,
little work has investigated what downstream harms propagate from this poor
service. How does poor usability materially manifest and affect users' lives?
And what interaction designs might help users recover from these effects? We
identify 6 downstream harms that propagate from quality-of-service harms in
voice assistants. Through interviews and design activities with 16
multicultural participants, we unveil these 6 harms, outline how multicultural
users uniquely personify their voice assistant, and suggest how these harms and
personifications may affect their interactions. Lastly, we employ techniques
from psychology on communication repair to contribute suggestions for
harm-reducing repair that may be implemented in voice technologies. Our
communication repair strategies include: identity affirmations (intermittent
frequency), cultural sensitivity, and blame redirection. This work shows
potential for a harm-repair framework to positively influence voice
interactions.Comment: 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24
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Consequences of bi-literacy in bilingual individuals: in the healthy and neurologically impaired
Background. In the current global, cross-cultural scenario, being bilingual or multilingual is a norm rather than an exception. In such an environment an individual may be actively involved in reading and writing in all their languages in addition to speaking them. Regular use of two or more languages is termed as bilingualism and being able to read and write in both of them is referred to as bi-literacy. Research indicates that bilingualism has an impact on language production and cognition, specifically executive functions. Given the impact of literacy and bilingualism, the reasonable question that arises, is whether bi-literacy would offer an additional impact on language production and cognition. This becomes even more relevant in a multilingual, multi-cultural society such as India. We examined the impact of bi-literacy on oral language production (at word and connected speech level), comprehension and on non-verbal executive function measures in bi-literate bilingual healthy adults in an immigrant diaspora living in the UK. In addition to English, they were speakers of one of the South Indian languages (Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu). The significance of bi-literacy among bilinguals assumes further importance in aphasia (language impairment due to brain damage). For those who have aphasia in one or more languages due to brain damage, the severity of impairment maybe different in both languages, also the modalities of language may be differentially affected. In particular, reading and writing maybe impaired differently in the languages used by a bi/multilingual. Manifestation of reading impairments are also dependent on the nature of the script of the language being read [e.g., Raman & Weekes (2005) report differential dyslexia in a Turkish-English speaker who exhibited surface dyslexia in English and deep dysgraphia in Turkish]. Our study contributes to the field of bilingual aphasia by focusing specifically on reading differing from the existing literature of aphasia in bilinguals, where the focus has predominantly been on language production and comprehension. Studying reading impairments provides a better understanding of how the reading impairments are manifested in the two languages, which will aid appropriate assessment and intervention. This research investigated the impact of bi-literacy in both populations (healthy adults and neurologically impaired) in two phases: Phase I (in UK) and Phase II (in India).
Aim. Phase I investigated the impact of bi-literacy on oral language production (at word level and connected speech), comprehension and non-verbal executive function in bi-literate bilingual healthy adults. Phase II examined the reading impairments in two languages of bilingual persons with aphasia (BPWA).
Methods. For Phase I, participants were thirty-four bi-literate bilingual healthy adults with English as their L2 and one of the Dravidian languages (Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu) as their L1. We have used the term ‘print exposure’ as a proxy for literacy. They were divided into a high print exposure (HPE, n=22) and a low print exposure (LPE, n=12) group based on their performance on two tasks measuring L2 print exposure- grammaticality judgement task and sentence verification task. We also quantified their bilingual characteristics- proficiency, reading and writing characteristics and dominance. The groups were matched on years of education, age and gender. Participants completed a set of oral language production tasks in L2 (at word level) namely -verbal fluency, word and non-word repetition; comprehension tasks in L2 namely synonymy triplets task and sentence comprehension task (Chapter 2); oral narrative task in L2 (at connected speech level) (Chapter 3) followed by non-verbal executive function tasks tapping into inhibitory control (Spatial Stroop and Flanker tasks), working memory (visual n-back and auditory n-back) and task switching (colour-shape task) (Chapter 4).
For Phase II, we characterized the reading abilities of four BPWA who spoke one of the Dravidian languages (Kannada, Tamil, Telugu) (alpha-syllabic) as their L1 and English (alphabetic) as their L2. We quantified their bilingual characteristics- proficiency, reading and writing characteristics and dominance. Subtests from the Psycholinguistic Assessment of Language Processing in Aphasia (PALPA; Kay, Lesser & Coltheart, 1992) were used to document the reading profile of BPWA in English and reading subtests from Reading Acquisition Profile (RAP-K; Rao, 1997) and words from Bilingual Aphasia test -Hindi (BAT; Paradis & Libben, 1987) were used to document the reading profile of BPWA in Kannada and Hindi respectively.
Findings. Based on the findings of Phase I (i.e., results from Chapter 2-4), we found prominent differences between HPE and LPE on comprehension measures (synonymy triplets and sentence comprehension tasks). This is in contrast to the results observed in monolingual adults, were semantics is less impacted by print exposure. Moreover, our predictions that HPE will result in better oral language production skills were borne out in specific conditions-semantic fluency and non-word repetition task (at word level) and higher number of words in the narrative, higher verbs per utterance and fewer repetitions (at connected speech level). In addition, the non-verbal executive functions, we found no direct link between print exposure (in L2) and non-verbal executive functions in bi-literate bilinguals excepting working memory (auditory N-back task). Additionally, another consistency in our findings is that there seems to be a strong link between print exposure and semantic processing in our research. The findings on the semantic tasks have been consistent across comprehension (synonymy triplets task and sentence comprehension task) and production (semantic fluency) favouring HPE. The findings from Phase II (Chapter 5) reveal differences of reading characteristics in the two languages (with different scripts) of the four BPWA. This research provides preliminary evidence that a script related difference exists in the manifestation of dyslexia in bi-scriptal BPWA speaking a combination of alphabetic and alpha-syllabic languages.
Conclusions. Our research contributes to the existing literature by highlighting the relationship between bi-literacy and language production, comprehension and non-verbal cognition where bi-literacy seems to have a higher impact on language than cognition. The contrary findings from the monolinguals and children literature, highlight the importance for considering nuances of bilingual research and specifically challenges the notion that semantic comprehension is not significantly affected by literacy. In the neurologically impaired population, our research provides a comprehensive profiling of reading abilities in BPWA in the Indian population with languages having different scripts. Using this profiling and classification, we are able to affirm the findings previously found in literature emphasizing the importance of script in the assessment of reading abilities in BPWA. Such profiling and classification assist in the development of bilingual models of reading aloud and classifying different types of reading impairments
Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey
Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social
nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational
linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article
we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics"
that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive
overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the
relation between language and social identity, language use in social
interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the
potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how
the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement
existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and
challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey
the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and
conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication:
18th February, 201
Predicting user acceptance of Tamil speech to text by native Tamil Brahmans
This thesis investigates and predicts the user acceptance of a speech to text application in Tamil and takes the view that user acceptance model would need to take into, the cultural constraints that apply in the context and underlines the need for a more explicit recognition. The user acceptance models such as Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) predominantly focus on the technological aspects to determine the acceptance. The cultural variables are considered as external but at the same time they acknowledge the influence of user acceptance due to external variables. The contribution to knowledge is, an empirical link between Tamil usage at a social level that indicates the ability to use and accept Tamil speech to text application. The economic value of Tamil, does not seem to warrant technology use and therefore, speech to text in Tamil was found to be less acceptable in the study samples.
In order to achieve the objective of predicting the user acceptance of speech to text in Tamil by the native Tamil speaking Brahmans, the researcher designed and evaluated a paper prototype of an iPhone iOS mobile representation of the paper prototype on the idea of 'what you speak is what you get'. As a result of the researcher’s insider position, the idea was to convert the speech as spoken by the person into Tamil orthography without any technological interference such as auto correct, word prediction and spell check. Due to the syllabic nature of the language and the cultural tendency to code mix and code-switch, the investigation focused on three key areas- code mixing, pronunciation and choice of script . This thesis looks at the complexities involved in accommodating these areas. The user's choice of script was increasingly important as it cannot be assumed that all native Tamil speakers are able to read and write Tamil.
In order to bring in rich data, the researcher used the insider and outsider positionality alongside phenomenology. This was also to overcome any potential bias in analysis and interpretation. The multidisciplinary approach to answer the research question was inevitable owing to cultural variables like value and usage of language, social perception of language and its usage specifically code-switching, pronunciation and orthography in the native space.
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Data gathering was done using quantitative study of transliteration and qualitative interviews of Tamil speaking Brahmans. The findings point to the Vedic philosophical texts and practices that influenced the attitude of the respondents on how words must be pronounced and how they ought to appear in text. The development of the speech to text application could be enriched by using a native approach that embeds cultural and philosophical values.
Based on the findings, this thesis has identified areas for further research which is to widely test the user acceptance model proposed in this thesis to aid development of speech to text and to further investigate on native perspective in the wider diaspora and also to investigate cultural and philosophical relevance in speech to text in other languages where technology is in developing stage
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