Attentive Speaking. From Listener Feedback to Interactive Adaptation

Buschmeier H. Attentive Speaking. From Listener Feedback to Interactive Adaptation. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2018.Dialogue is an interactive endeavour in which participants jointly pursue the goal of reaching understanding. Since participants enter the interaction with their individual conceptualisation of the world and their idiosyncratic way of using language, understanding cannot, in general, be reached by exchanging messages that are encoded when speaking and decoded when listening. Instead, speakers need to design their communicative acts in such a way that listeners are likely able to infer what is meant. Listeners, in turn, need to provide evidence of their understanding in such a way that speakers can infer whether their communicative acts were successful. This is often an interactive and iterative process in which speakers and listeners work towards understanding by jointly coordinating their communicative acts through feedback and adaptation. Taking part in this interactive process requires dialogue participants to have ‘interactional intelligence’. This conceptualisation of dialogue is rather uncommon in formal or technical approaches to dialogue modelling. This thesis argues that it may, nevertheless, be a promising research direction for these fields, because it de-emphasises raw language processing performance and focusses on fundamental interaction skills. Interactionally intelligent artificial conversational agents may thus be able to reach understanding with their interlocutors by drawing upon such competences. This will likely make them more robust, more understandable, more helpful, more effective, and more human-like. This thesis develops conceptual and computational models of interactional intelligence for artificial conversational agents that are limited to (1) the speaking role, and (2) evidence of understanding in form of communicative listener feedback (short but expressive verbal/vocal signals, such as ‘okay’, ‘mhm’ and ‘huh’, head gestures, and gaze). This thesis argues that such ‘attentive speaker agents’ need to be able (1) to probabilistically reason about, infer, and represent their interlocutors’ listening related mental states (e.g., their degree of understanding), based on their interlocutors’ feedback behaviour; (2) to interactively adapt their language and behaviour such that their interlocutors’ needs, derived from the attributed mental states, are taken into account; and (3) to decide when they need feedback from their interlocutors and how they can elicit it using behavioural cues.This thesis describes computational models for these three processes, their integration in an incremental behaviour generation architecture for embodied conversational agents, and a semi-autonomous interaction study in which the resulting attentive speaker agent is evaluated. The evaluation finds that the computational models of attentive speaking developed in this thesis enable conversational agents to interactively reach understanding with their human interlocutors (through feedback and adaptation) and that these interlocutors are willing to provide natural communicative listener feedback to such an attentive speaker agent. The thesis shows that computationally modelling interactional intelligence is generally feasible, and thereby raises many new research questions and engineering problems in the interdisciplinary fields of dialogue and artificial conversational agents

Centeredness: A qualitative study on the mind-body connection

Centeredness is the concept of living in a constant state of awareness of the physical, psychological and spiritual selves. Through this awareness, a person has the ability for greater connection to their self, health and the world around them, thus leading to the ability to seek optimal health. The purpose of this study is to explore this concept and its experience from the perspective of those who claim to be experts on such a topic

The Madhyamaka Speaks to the West: A philosophical analysis of śūnyatā as a universal truth

Through a philosophical analysis of realist interpretations of Madhyamaka Buddhism, I will argue that the Madhyamaka is not well represented when it is represented as nihilism, absolutism or as some non-metaphysical alternative. Indeed, I will argue that the Madhyamaka is misrepresented when it is represented as anything; its radical context sensitivity entails that it cannot be autonomously volunteered. The Madhyamaka analysis disrupts the ontic and epistemic presuppositions that consider inherent existence and absolute truth to be possible and necessary, and so the ultimate truth, śūnyatā, is not an absolute truth or ultimate reality. However, I will argue that śūnyatā does qualify as a universal truth and should be understood as a context-insensitive, non-propositional truth in a non-dual dependent relationship with the multitudinous context-sensitive, propositional truths. This analysis will prove helpful in an investigation of those tensions, discernible within Buddhist modernism and the discourse of scientific Buddhism, that arise when Buddhist apologists claim a timeless modernity and a non-hostility with respect to contemporary worldviews. I will argue that apologists can resolve these tensions and satisfy their intuitions of timelessness, but only if they are willing to foreground the crucial distinction between their Buddhist worldview (their context-sensitive propositional truths) and their Madhyamaka attitude towards that worldview (the context-insensitive truth of śūnyatā). I will go on to generalise this result, showing that this Madhyamaka analysis opens up the possibility for frictionless co-operation between any and all worldviews, and that we therefore have a philosophical basis for a workable and sensitive theory of worldview pluralism. I will find it necessary to defend this position by demonstrating that, despite its context-insensitivity, the ultimate truth’s non-dual relationship with conventional truth mitigates against moral and epistemic relativism. I will further substantiate my claim as to the universal truth of śūnyatā by showing that, in Karan Barad’s ‘agential realism’, we find a revealing example of śūnyatā being articulated from within a non-Buddhist context. Thus, I hope to demonstrate some of the good effects of the Madhyamaka message, and show that this message can only be communicated clearly when it is distinguished from the discourses of Buddhism. In this manner, not by giving it a voice but through finding its voiceless authority, I hope to enable the Madhyamaka speak to the West

Radical dialectics in the experimental poetry of Berssenbrugge, Hejinian, Harryman, Weiner, and Scalapino

In this dissertation, I focus on the work of five contemporary experimental poets - Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Hannah Weiner, and Leslie Scalapino - in order to demonstrate various aspects of a philosophical dynamic at work in their poetry. The critical debates surrounding experimental poetry often tend to be structured as a dualistic opposition with, for example, the forces of coherence, narrative linearity, and transparent referentiality on one side, and the forces of semantic disruption, narrative discontinuity, and linguistic materiality on the other. On each side, critics attempt to bolster the essential value of one term or set of terms over the other, in a binary polarity. However, such a critique only leads to the formation of another hierarchy. I believe that it is important to understand the dialectical motion at work in much experimental poetry in order to avoid lapsing into reductive theories that reinstate hierarchical structures and dualistic thinking. By describing a radical dialectics, I am proposing a strategy of reading experimental work that recognizes its philosophical significance and its attempts to complicate dualistic conceptual constructions such as public and private realms of experience, subject and object relations, and narrative and non-narrative forces. This strategy emphasizes the mutually informing and critiquing dialogue and the nonresolving aspect of the dynamic interplay between conceptually opposed terms. I demonstrate this interdependent dialogue in several different yet related realms, including subject and object perceptual experience, the construction of individual subjectivity, temporality and narrativity, and intersubjectivity. To support my argument for the dialectical motion that I describe in the poetry, I draw upon a diverse range of thinkers, some of whom have influenced the poets whose work I analyze. These theorists span a wide range of fields, including ancient Indian Buddhist philosophy, cognitive science, feminist psychoanalysis, and phenomenology. In their various ways, these thinkers share, along with the poets with whom I place them side by side, the common project of transforming a dualistic view of the world and engaging in a profoundly dialectical philosophical project

On Whether Or Not Merleau-Ponty\u27s Phenomenology of Lived Body Experience Can Enrich St. Thomas Aquinas\u27s Integral Anthropology

I argue that Merleau-Ponty\u27s phenomenology of lived body experience can be used to enrich Aquinas\u27s integral anthropology. In Chapter One I lay out the possibilities of such an enrichment by examining contemporary philosophers of mind who draw on Aquinas and Merleau-Ponty in strikingly similar ways. Analytical Thomists, as represented by Eric LaRock, and thinkers seeking to integrate neuropsychology and phenomenology, like Ralph Ellis, argue that that the concept of form (taken from Aquinas and Merleau-Ponty respectively) is necessary for properly understanding the human being as an integral unity of intellectual principle and body. I then pose potential objections to my project: 1) that Aquinas\u27s method of syllogistic demonstration and dependence on tradition is not compatible with Merleau-Ponty\u27s use of phenomenological description and insistence that philosophy be grounded in immediate subjective experience; 2) that their basic anthropological terms (e.g. soul, body, consciousness, form) might radically differ; 3) that Merleau-Ponty\u27s phenomenology, if a form of idealism or materialism, might preclude compatibility leading to enrichment. In Chapter Two I outline the broad metaphysical structure of Aquinas\u27s thought and then present his argument that the intellectual soul is form of the body. In Chapter Three I outline Merleau-Ponty\u27s basic philosophical methodology and then present his phenomenological explorations of consciousness (or soul) as form of the body. Chapter Four is devoted to overcoming the objections raised in Chapter One. I argue, for example, that there is a foundation for compatibility between Aquinas and Merleau-Ponty in that both believe perception is the basis for any philosophical knowledge and both appeal to interior experience for concluding that the human being is an integral union of intellectual principle and body. I conclude by arguing that Merleau-Ponty\u27s phenomenological descriptions of lived body experience can enrich Aquinas\u27s philosophical anthropology in at least three ways: 1) they richly illustrate Aquinas\u27s position that the intellectual soul is form of the body; 2) they can offer better practical examples for Aquinas\u27s arguments than he himself provides; 3) they can be used to extend Aquinas\u27s claims regarding the intellect\u27s knowledge of itself

Sensitivity analysis in a scoping review on police accountability : assessing the feasibility of reporting criteria in mixed studies reviews

In this paper, we report on the findings of a sensitivity analysis that was carried out within a previously conducted scoping review, hoping to contribute to the ongoing debate about how to assess the quality of research in mixed methods reviews. Previous sensitivity analyses mainly concluded that the exclusion of inadequately reported or lower quality studies did not have a significant effect on the results of the synthesis. In this study, we conducted a sensitivity analysis on the basis of reporting criteria with the aims of analysing its impact on the synthesis results and assessing its feasibility. Contrary to some previous studies, our analysis showed that the exclusion of inadequately reported studies had an impact on the results of the thematic synthesis. Initially, we also sought to propose a refinement of reporting criteria based on the literature and our own experiences. In this way, we aimed to facilitate the assessment of reporting criteria and enhance its consistency. However, based on the results of our sensitivity analysis, we opted not to make such a refinement since many publications included in this analysis did not sufficiently report on the methodology. As such, a refinement would not be useful considering that researchers would be unable to assess these (sub-)criteria

Phenomenology and difference: the body, architecture and race

The aim of the thesis is to consider the position of phenomenology in contemporary thought in order to argue that only on its terms can a political ontology of difference be thought. To inaugurate this project I being by questioning Heidegger's relation to phenomenology. I take issue with the way that Heidegger privileges time over space in "Being and Time". In this way, the task of the thesis is clarified as the need to elaborate a spatio-temporal phenomenology. After re-situating Heidegger's failure in this respect within a Kantian background, I suggest that the phenomenological grounding of difference must work through the body. I contend that the body is the ontological site of both the subject and the object. I use Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty to explore the ramifications of this thesis. I suggest first of all that architecture should be grounded ontologically in the body, and as such avoids being a 'master discourse'. Secondly, by theorising the body and world as reciprocally transformative, my reading of Merleau-Ponty emphasises the ways in which his thinking opens up a phenomenology of embodied difference. It is on the basis of these themes that I develop this thinking in the direction of race, exploring the dialectics of visibility and invisibility in the work of Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin. I argue that embodied difference attests to variations in the agent's freedom to act in the world. If freedom is understood through Merleau-Ponty as being the embodied ground of historicity, we must ask after unfreedom. I suggest that the "flesh" ontology of a pre-thetic community should be rethought as a regulative ideal, the ideal of a justice that can never be given. In this light, phenomenology becomes as much as poetics. Beyond being though of as conservative, phenomenology henceforth unleashes the possibility of thinking a transformative embodied agency

Uncommon ground: the distribution of dialogue contexts

PhDContext in dialogue is at once regarded as a set of resources enabling successful interpretation and is altered by such interpretations. A key problem for models of dialogue, then, is to specify how the shared context evolves. However, these models have been developed mainly to account for the way context is built up through direct interaction between pairs of participants. In multi-party dialogue, patterns of direct interaction between participants are often more unevenly distributed. This thesis explores the effects of this characteristic on the development of shared contexts. A corpus analysis of ellipsis shows that side-participants can reach the same level of grounding as speaker and addressee. Such dialogues result in collective contexts that are not reducible to their component dyadic interactions. It is proposed that this is characteristic of dialogues in which a subgroup of the participants are organised into a party, who act as a unified aggregate to carry the conversation forward. Accordingly, the contextual increments arising from a dialogue move from one party member can affect the party as a whole. Grounding, like turn-taking, can therefore operate between parties rather than individuals. An experimental test of this idea is presented which provides evidence for the practical reality of parties. Two further experiments explore the impact of party membership on the accessibility of context. The results indicate that participants who, for a stretch of talk, fall inside and outside of the interacting parties, effect divergent contextual increments. This is evidence for the emergence of distinct dialogue contexts in the same conversation. Finally, it is argued that these findings present significant challenges for how formal models of dialogue deal with individual contributions. In particular, they point to the need for such models to index the resulting contextual increments to specific subsets of the participant

The Role of Theory in the Supervision of Ministry

We live in a postmodern age where any claim by a particular theory to explain universal truths is vehemently challenged. No longer can any one theory exercise hegemony in understanding fully and completely a particular set of circumstances or realities. All knowledge—of which theoretical knowledge is a part—is constrained by its social location and is, thereby, limited in its ability to speak too broadly. Thus, the role of theory in general has been brought into question by postmodern thinking and consequently raises questions for us as to whether or not theory can have a role in our understanding of the supervision of ministry

Truth, objectivity and subjectivity in accounting

The central thesis defended here is that we can have truth and objectivity in accounting. We do not contend that this potential is presently realized: On the contrary, we argue that certain contradictions immanent to capitalism give rise in late modernity to crisis tendencies in financial accounting as a way of knowing - epistemological crisis. We do contend that accounting's tendencies to epistemological crises can, at least in theory, be overcome. We begin to defend this view by considering accounting as an essentially descriptive activity. The account given by the philosopher Donald Davidson of the very possibility of knowledge is used to justify the view that intersubjectivity is all the foundation we need, or can have, for objectivity, and to defend out claim that we can have accounting knowledge, that is, true accounts/descriptions of an objective and intersubjectively accessible public world. The defence here is against those theorists, including those inspired by certain strands of the phenomenological, (post)structuralist and hermeneutic traditions, who would deny the possibility of any such objectivity in accounting. Using an analysis of the history and debate surrounding the issue of accounting for deferred tax in the United Kingdom (UK), we endeavour to locate accounting in terms of the dichotomy the philosopher Bernard Williams draws between science and ethics. We find that the descriptive and normative are inextricably entangled in accounting concepts in much the same way as they are entangled in thick ethical concepts such as 'chastity' or 'courage'. We recognise that the descriptive aspect of accounting can not be neatly distinguished from the normative and dealt with separately. Furthermore, following Williams, we argue that difficulties associated with the objective validation of the normative dimension of thick accounting concepts renders knowledge held under them vulnerable to destruction by reflection