How Helpdesk Agents Help Clients

Helpdesks are an important channel for supporting users of technical products and software. This study analyses some phenomena in telephone helpdesk calls, using conversational analysis as a methodological and theoretical framework. Helpdesk calls are characterized by the common goal of the helpdesk agent and the client to understand and solve the client's problem with a particular technical device or with computer software. Both parties cooperate in a complex manner to define and diagnose the problem, and to solve it. The paper identifies the typical structure of a helpdesk call and describes a number of strategies that the participants use to make the call successful

From deep dyslexia to agrammatic comprehension on silent reading

We report on a case of a French-speaking patient whose performance on reading aloud single words was characteristically deep dyslexic (in spite of preserved ability to identify letters), and whose comprehension on silent sentence reading was agrammatic and strikingly poorer than on oral reading. The first part of the study is mainly informative as regards (i) the relationship between letter identification, semantic paralexias and the ability to read nonwords, (ii) the differential character of silent and oral reading tasks, and (iii) the potential modality-dependent character of the deficits in comprehension encountered. In the second part of the study we examine the patient's sensitivity to verb-noun ambiguity and probe her skills in the comprehension of indexical structures by exploring her ability to cope with number agreement and temporal and prepositional relations. The results indicate the patient's sensitivity to certain dimensions of these linguistic categories, reveal a partly correct basis for certain incorrect responses, and, on the whole, favor a definition of the patient's disorders in terms of a deficit in integrating indexical information in language comprehension. More generally, the present study substantiates a microgenetic approach to neuropsychology, where the pathological behavior due to brain damage is described as an arrest of microgenesis at an early stage of development, so that patient's responses take the form of unfinished "products" which would normally undergo further development

Learning when to point : a data-driven approach

The relationship between how people describe objects and when they choose to point is complex and likely to be influenced by factors related to both perceptual and discourse context. In this paper, we explore these interactions using machine-learning on a dialogue corpus, to identify multimodal referential strategies that can be used in automatic multimodal generation. We show that the decision to use a pointing gesture depends on features of the accompanying description (especially whether it contains spatial information), and on visual properties, especially distance or separation of a referent from its previous referent.peer-reviewe

Automatic summarising: factors and directions

This position paper suggests that progress with automatic summarising demands a better research methodology and a carefully focussed research strategy. In order to develop effective procedures it is necessary to identify and respond to the context factors, i.e. input, purpose, and output factors, that bear on summarising and its evaluation. The paper analyses and illustrates these factors and their implications for evaluation. It then argues that this analysis, together with the state of the art and the intrinsic difficulty of summarising, imply a nearer-term strategy concentrating on shallow, but not surface, text analysis and on indicative summarising. This is illustrated with current work, from which a potentially productive research programme can be developed

Culture-specific notions in L2 communication strategies

Communication strategies (CS) used by L2 speakers have been investigated using various tasks, and it has been demonstrated that there exist task effects that cause differences in CS choice. Previously missing in CS research has been the use of culture-specific notions as referents. This study aimed at exploring CS use for culture-specific notions in L2 by answering two questions: “What kinds of CS will Thai ESL speakers employ to convey these referential concepts in English?” and “ Will there be any patterns that can be observed as different from CS used in other kinds of tasks?” The participants, 30 Thai native speakers with intermediate English proficiency, were asked to perform two tasks that contain culture-specific notions. The analysis focuses on 14 concepts that were expected to be problematic. The results showed that circumlocution and approximation were the most preferred strategies. Patterns of approximation, all-purpose words, and L1 words followed by circumlocution were also seen and found to be similar to the hierarchy of CS found elsewhere in the referential CS research. Finally, the study suggests that the familiarity of the L2 speaker with a concept does not always help them in dealing with communicative problems; rather it is their knowledge of how to talk about it in the L2 that matters more

Side Effects Of Self-Referential Discussion: The Impact And Interaction Of Deductive And Inductive Routes Of Identity

Studies of group communication and group identity rest on two competing theoretical concepts of the group, one that prioritizes examining the relationships between members and one that examines the group as a gestalt construct. For live groups, it is not always clear which style, individual or gestalt, is most appropriate or provides more insight into any specific group because groups’ identities and communication behaviors are sometimes explicable by both theoretical concepts. This occurs because in real-world groups the formation process typically involves an amalgamation of both influences. In other words, live groups form identities built around both members’ individual traits and categorical commonalities among members. When group formation occurs, it is not always clear which theoretical concept should guide the analysis because when both identity formation styles occur together, research currently lacks a way to determine which has more influence on the resulting group. The present study brings our theoretical understanding of group formation closer to groups in a live context. It does so by forming groups under conditions that provide opportunities to foster both formation styles and measuring members’ perception of gestalt or individually focal group identity. Results indicate that members tended to perceive a greater degree of gestalt identity, but not to the exclusion of individual identity

Survey of the State of the Art in Natural Language Generation: Core tasks, applications and evaluation

This paper surveys the current state of the art in Natural Language Generation (NLG), defined as the task of generating text or speech from non-linguistic input. A survey of NLG is timely in view of the changes that the field has undergone over the past decade or so, especially in relation to new (usually data-driven) methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey therefore aims to (a) give an up-to-date synthesis of research on the core tasks in NLG and the architectures adopted in which such tasks are organised; (b) highlight a number of relatively recent research topics that have arisen partly as a result of growing synergies between NLG and other areas of artificial intelligence; (c) draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, relating them to similar challenges faced in other areas of Natural Language Processing, with an emphasis on different evaluation methods and the relationships between them.Comment: Published in Journal of AI Research (JAIR), volume 61, pp 75-170. 118 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl