XL-NBT: A Cross-lingual Neural Belief Tracking Framework

Task-oriented dialog systems are becoming pervasive, and many companies heavily rely on them to complement human agents for customer service in call centers. With globalization, the need for providing cross-lingual customer support becomes more urgent than ever. However, cross-lingual support poses great challenges---it requires a large amount of additional annotated data from native speakers. In order to bypass the expensive human annotation and achieve the first step towards the ultimate goal of building a universal dialog system, we set out to build a cross-lingual state tracking framework. Specifically, we assume that there exists a source language with dialog belief tracking annotations while the target languages have no annotated dialog data of any form. Then, we pre-train a state tracker for the source language as a teacher, which is able to exploit easy-to-access parallel data. We then distill and transfer its own knowledge to the student state tracker in target languages. We specifically discuss two types of common parallel resources: bilingual corpus and bilingual dictionary, and design different transfer learning strategies accordingly. Experimentally, we successfully use English state tracker as the teacher to transfer its knowledge to both Italian and German trackers and achieve promising results.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, accepted to EMNLP 2018 conferenc

Dēnkard III language variation and the defence of socio-religious identity in the context of Early-Islamic Iran

The aim of the present paper is to illustrate as a case study, the linguistic and stylistic peculiarities characterizing the third book of the Dēnkard, one of the most authoritative texts in Zoroastrian Pahlavi literature (9th-10th CE). The analysis will consider these features as part of a coherent system, styled to serve the dialectic strategies pursued by the Zoroastrian high priests in response to the pressures their own community was facing in the early Islamic period. In order to provide a more comprehensive overview on DkIII language distinctiveness, the research will underline the outward/inward dynamics, addressing both the relation of this theological dialectic with the surrounding socio-cultural environment and the leadingrole claims of a group within a politically subordinated community

Discursive Leadership: Exploring the Black Box Challenge in Transcultural Leadership Studies

The increasingly globalized U.S. workforce includes significant numbers of adult immigrants integrating into the North American professional sphere. As such, it is important to have concrete ways to study and interpret different cultures’ thinking about teamwork, and their models of enacting shared leadership and communication in a multicultural context. Since 2006, hundreds of millions in federal grant funding has been invested in university-based language and culture programs focused on training government personnel and heritage populations in the languages and cultures of the Middle East and Central and Southeast Asia. Little is known about the performative strengths and challenges of the culturally diverse project teams that so often staff these grant programs. Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants’ understanding and definitions of constructs like leadership, authority, and teamwork, are not well represented in contemporary leadership studies scholarship. Given this, there are few actionable best practices to implement when leading or working in and among culturally diverse teams. To address this issue, the study analyzed and compared 12 participants’ perceptions on the nature of leadership, authority, teamwork, and communication in both their cultures of origin and in their experiences in the U.S. It also examined participants’ workplace discourse produced in the performance of group decision-making tasks. The study entailed analyzing video and audio recorded (a) one-on-one qualitative interviews and (b) group decision-making meetings —with and among Arabic, Afghan, Chinese, and Persian language and culture instructors participating in a federally funded teacher-training program at a public university in the southwestern United States. Interview data were analyzed qualitatively, focusing on participants’ cultural definitions of leadership, authority, teamwork, and professional communications. The group meetings were studied using discourse analysis techniques; the quantitative discourse analysis results were compared with themes that emerged from the qualitative interviews. The results strongly suggest culture’s ability to constrain or liberate individuals’ and groups’ productive participation in team interactions. The discourse data reinforced several important qualitative findings —and also suggested practical implications for leading culturally diverse teams. The overall findings affirm the utility of discourse analysis as a method for studying transcultural leadership, while also highlighting the non-monolithic nature of world cultures

A prototype for a conversational companion for reminiscing about images

This work was funded by the COMPANIONS project sponsored by the European Commission as part of the Information Society Technologies (IST) programme under EC grant number IST-FP6-034434. Companions demonstrators can be seen at: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/∼roberta/companions/Web/.This paper describes an initial prototype of the Companions project (www.companions-project.org): the Senior Companion (SC), designed to be a platform to display novel approaches to: (1) The use of Information Extraction (IE) techniques to extract the content of incoming dialogue utterances after an ASR phase. (2) The conversion of the input to RDF form to allow the generation of new facts from existing ones, under the control of a Dialogue Manager (DM), that also has access to stored knowledge and knowledge accessed in real time from the web, all in RDF form. (3) A DM expressed as a stack and network virtual machine that models mixed initiative in dialogue control. (4) A tuned dialogue act detector based on corpus evidence. The prototype platform was evaluated, and we describe this; it is also designed to support more extensive forms of emotion detection carried by both speech and lexical content, as well as extended forms of machine learning. We describe preliminary studies and results for these, in particular a novel approach to enabling reinforcement learning for open dialogue systems through the detection of emotion in the speech signal and its deployment as a form of a learned DM, at a higher level than the DM virtual machine and able to direct the SC’s responses to a more emotionally appropriate part of its repertoire. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.peer-reviewe

Frequent translation strategies used by Iranian translators in subtitles to translate metaphors

En tant que moyen de communication qui détermine les structures de base des langues, la métaphore se classe parmi les enjeux les plus importants du domaine de la traductologie, d’où la complexité de la rendre traduisible. La nature indirecte de la métaphore étant problématique, celle-ci exige une étude approfondie, surtout vis-à-vis le transfert de la culture d’une langue à une autre. Un survol de la littérature académique traitant des théories et des approches différentes en traductologie révèle une façon de rendre possible la traduction de la métaphore. Cette étude traite de la traduction des métaphores du perse aux sous-titres anglais. Elle indique également les approches et les stratégies appliquées à la traduction des expressions linguistiques métaphoriques telles que proposées par Newmark (1988). En se fondant sur des exemples authentiques tirés des textes sources (deux films perses bien connus) et leurs traductions anglaises, cette étude démontre la façon dont certains traducteurs iraniens traduisent des expressions métaphoriques en se servant d’une des sept stratégies proposées par Newmark. Elle explique également comment certains éléments (par ex. les difficultés de la traduction) ont été influents sur leurs conclusions, tout en soutenant l’hypothèse que la reproduction d’une même image d’une langue source dans une langue cible ainsi que l’effacement sont respectivement la plus fréquente et la moins fréquente des stratégies employées par les sous-titreurs iraniens.Metaphor, as a means of communication that determines the basic structures of language, is currently one of the most important issues in the field of translation studies, especially its translatability. In fact, the indirect nature of metaphors is a problem that needs to be addressed in respect to the transfer of culture from one language to another one. An overview of the literature that explores different theories and approaches in the field of Translation Studies proposes a way to make metaphor translation possible. This study examines the translation of metaphors from Persian to English subtitles. It also highlights approaches and strategies for the translation of linguistic metaphorical expressions as proposed by Newmark (1988). By using authentic examples from two source texts (two well known Persian films) along with their English translations, this study illustrates how Iranian translators translate metaphorical expressions using Newmark’s seven proposed strategies. It also shows how certain elements (i.e. translation difficulties) have influenced their decisions and supports the hypotheses in which reproducing the same SL image in the target language and deletion, respectively, are the most frequent and the least frequent strategies used by Iranian subtitlers

Affective social anthropomorphic intelligent system

Human conversational styles are measured by the sense of humor, personality, and tone of voice. These characteristics have become essential for conversational intelligent virtual assistants. However, most of the state-of-the-art intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) are failed to interpret the affective semantics of human voices. This research proposes an anthropomorphic intelligent system that can hold a proper human-like conversation with emotion and personality. A voice style transfer method is also proposed to map the attributes of a specific emotion. Initially, the frequency domain data (Mel-Spectrogram) is created by converting the temporal audio wave data, which comprises discrete patterns for audio features such as notes, pitch, rhythm, and melody. A collateral CNN-Transformer-Encoder is used to predict seven different affective states from voice. The voice is also fed parallelly to the deep-speech, an RNN model that generates the text transcription from the spectrogram. Then the transcripted text is transferred to the multi-domain conversation agent using blended skill talk, transformer-based retrieve-and-generate generation strategy, and beam-search decoding, and an appropriate textual response is generated. The system learns an invertible mapping of data to a latent space that can be manipulated and generates a Mel-spectrogram frame based on previous Mel-spectrogram frames to voice synthesize and style transfer. Finally, the waveform is generated using WaveGlow from the spectrogram. The outcomes of the studies we conducted on individual models were auspicious. Furthermore, users who interacted with the system provided positive feedback, demonstrating the system's effectiveness.Comment: Multimedia Tools and Applications (2023

EXPLORING EFL TEACHERS' TECHNIQUES IN TEACHING ORAL SKILLS IN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOLS OF SHAHROOD, IRAN: A QUALITATIVE STUDY

Instead of following grand theories and methods prescribed during pre-service and in-service teacher education programs, experienced teachers follows their own theories of practice. However, due to the dominance of hypothetico-deductive mode of inquiry in language teaching, theories of practice have rarely been explored. To uncover personal theories implicit in teachers’ practice and how these theories are realized in down-to-earth techniques, this data-driven study aims at exploring fifteen experienced teachers’ techniques of teaching oral skills in junior high schools of Shahrood, a major city in Semnan province. To this end, teachers’ perspectives were qualitatively explored and analysed through the principles and procedures of grounded theory. Final analysis revealed that the participants used “Learners’ Mother Tongue”, "Warm-up", and "Role-play", "Summarizing”, “Storytelling", " Describing Pictures" and "Practicing Linguistic Patterns" to teach oral skills. The findings have clear implications for curriculum developers and pre-service language teacher educators.   Article visualizations