BigEAR: Inferring the Ambient and Emotional Correlates from Smartphone-based Acoustic Big Data

This paper presents a novel BigEAR big data framework that employs psychological audio processing chain (PAPC) to process smartphone-based acoustic big data collected when the user performs social conversations in naturalistic scenarios. The overarching goal of BigEAR is to identify moods of the wearer from various activities such as laughing, singing, crying, arguing, and sighing. These annotations are based on ground truth relevant for psychologists who intend to monitor/infer the social context of individuals coping with breast cancer. We pursued a case study on couples coping with breast cancer to know how the conversations affect emotional and social well being. In the state-of-the-art methods, psychologists and their team have to hear the audio recordings for making these inferences by subjective evaluations that not only are time-consuming and costly, but also demand manual data coding for thousands of audio files. The BigEAR framework automates the audio analysis. We computed the accuracy of BigEAR with respect to the ground truth obtained from a human rater. Our approach yielded overall average accuracy of 88.76% on real-world data from couples coping with breast cancer.Comment: 6 pages, 10 equations, 1 Table, 5 Figures, IEEE International Workshop on Big Data Analytics for Smart and Connected Health 2016, June 27, 2016, Washington DC, US

Tour Guiding Conversations: What Can We Learn From Them?

This research presents conversations between guides and tourists during guiding tours. The data were taken from a larger research on tasks in tour guiding, collected from observations of several tours. The conversations were discussed in terms of how the guide and the tourist developed the topics of the conversations. This paper also analyses problems in the conversations using the framework from Varonis and Gass (1985). They suggest that problems in communication can be identified by looking at the ‘trigger\u27 and the ‘indicator\u27 of problems in conversations. The analysis of the conversations indicated that the guide and the tourist in their conversations were actively engaged in the topic. They gave opinions, contributed to the conversations, and provided information to the topic. The analysis also indicated that there were four types of indicators of communication problems: (1) explicit questions, (2) clarification requests, (3) confirmation checks, and (4) rephrasing

Competing creole transcripts on trial

A criminal prosecution of Jamaican Creole (JC) speaking ‘posse’(=gang) members in New York included evidence of recorded speech in JC. Clandestinerecordings (discussions of criminal events, including narration of a homicide) wereintroduced at trial. Taped data were translated for prosecution by a non-linguist nativespeaker of JC. Defense disputed these texts and commissioned alternative transcriptionsfrom a creolist linguist, who was a non-speaker of JC. Prosecution in turn hired anothercreolist, a near-native speaker of and specialist in JC, to testify on the relative accuracyof both sets of earlier texts. Differing representations of key conversations weresubmitted to a non-creole speaking judge/jury, both linguists testified, and defendantswere convicted. The role of linguistic testimony and practice (especially transcription)in the trial is analysed. A typology of linguistic expertise is given, and effects of thelanguage’s Creole status and lack of instrumentalization on the trial are discussed

Boundary Formation and Cultural Construction: How do Chinese andIndian Immigrant Converts Understand Religious Identity?

Most scholars study immigrants\u27 religious lives in a vacuum, paying little attention to the religious lives of people who switch from one religious tradition to another. This article relies on interviews with Chinese and Indian immigrant converts in the U.S. to provide a unique comparative perspective on the religious lives of Asian immigrant converts, with a specific focus on their identity construction processes. Findings indicate that Chinese and Indian immigrants establish different types of boundaries, but form similar cultural content within their identities. I debunk the assumption in existing theories that religious conversion is an either/or transition

Politeness in Ecuadorian Spanish

This paper examines politeness phenomena in Ecuadorian Spanish as reflected in the language of telephone conversations, and, as such, attempts to add another cultural perspective to the discussion of politeness issues and of Brown and Levinson's (1978, 1987) much criticized theory, in particular. It highlights some of the difficulties involved in the application of Brown and Levinson's theory to actual conversational data in Ecuadorian Spanish, such as the frequent occurrence of embeddedness, which brings into question their notions of positive and negative politeness strategies as clear-cut categories, and the lack of one-to-one correspondence between certain forms and their politeness value, which poses problems for generalizations. It also explores the motivations behind participants' use of certain strategies and brings into question Brown and Brown and Levinson's notion of face. In addition, it considers some features of politeness at the macro-speech level (cf. van Dijk, 1977, 1980), which Brown and Levinson do not seem to take into account. Finally, it suggests that it might be fruitful to seek explanations for some aspects of linguistic politeness in fields that deal with social behavior and patterns of social interaction (e.g. social psychology and social anthropology). It nevertheless also suggests that to arrive at a more adequate characterization and understanding of politeness phenomena in Ecuadorian Spanish, it might be useful to examine some aspects of its history and the development of what today constitute its key social institutions

The shape of online meetings

Live videoconferencing has become an integral part of international virtual learning and working with professionals, educators and students using online meetings to enhance their collaboration from different parts of the world. This paper explores the visualization of a set of different online meetings produced by the FlashMeeting' videoconferencing system. Our polar area visualization analysis reveals interesting patterns in participant dominance in online meetings: seminars, interviews, moderated project meetings, peer-to-peer meetings, web-casts and video lectures. Visualizing patterns in the use of foreground and background communication channels is a promising way to help us to start to explore individual user roles in different communities and in different meeting types

Integrative motivation in a globalizing world

This article reports on research into the motivation of Indonesian children aged 11–12 years old, as they begin formal study of English in an urban junior high school. The research used closed and open questionnaire items, backed up by class observations and interviews with a selected group of learners. Very high levels of motivation to learn the language were found throughout the cohort, including both integrative and instrumental orientations, but these two traditionally distinct constructs were found to be almost indistinguishable. The article argues that as English loses its association with particular Anglophone cultures and is instead identified with the powerful forces of globalization, the desire to ‘integrate’ loses its explanatory power in many EFL contexts. Individuals may aspire towards a ‘bicultural’ identity which incorporates an English-speaking globally-involved version of themselves in addition to their local L1-speaking self. It is speculated that changes in individuals' motivation to learn the language may therefore be partly explained by reference to ongoing processes of identification, especially during the formative years of adolescence

Introduction: The difference that makes a difference

This article introduces TripleC’s Special Issue on The Difference That Makes a Difference, containing papers arising from a workshop of the same name that ran in Milton Keynes in September 2011. The background to the workshop is explained, workshop sessions are summarised, and the content of the papers introduced. Finally, some provisional outcomes from the workshop and the Special Issue are described

Past Spaces and Revisits in Transnational Poetry: The Sojourning Returnee of Shirley Geok-Lin Lim’s Do You Live In?

This essay explores the shifting vantage-point of a temporary returnee and an observant sojourner in the poetry of Shirley Geok-Lin Lim. Situating Lim’s recent collection, Do You Live In? (2015) both in the context of her renewed migrations to different places in Asia and within a widening transnational project of reconceptualizing traditional dichotomies of the diasporic, a critical discussion of her latest poetry enables us to trace how reflections on memory and place in a world of growing global change and exchanges can contribute to an awareness of the everyday experiences of the transnational. The lyric form allows Lim to express the emotional experience of the moment, and the collection as a whole consequently produces a juxtaposition of divergent emotions: snapshots of returns and the reordering of memory. While the bounded self is located in what Lim terms a “place of nomadism,” the heteroglossia of individual lyrics expresses the multiplicity of influences and their re-appropriation. In her seemingly most localized poems, personal memories encounter – and rip apart – heritage nostalgia to engage self-consciously with transnational experience