What robots want? Hearing the inner voice of a robot

The inner speech is thoroughly studied in humans, and it represents an interdisciplinary research issue involving psychology, neuroscience, and pedagogy. A few papers only, mostly theoretical, analyze the role of inner speech in robots. The present study investigates the potential of the robot's inner speech while cooperating with human partners. A cognitive architecture is designed and integrated with standard robot routines into a complex framework. Two threads of interaction are discussed by setting the robot operations with and without inner speech. Thanks to the robotic self-dialog, the partner can easily trace the robot's processes. Moreover, the robot can better solve conflicts leading to successful goal achievements. The results show that functional and transparency requirements, according to the international standards ISO/TS:2016 and COMEST/Unesco for collaborative robots, are better met when inner speech accompanies human-robot interaction. The inner speech could be applied in many robotics contexts, such as learning, regulation, and attentio

Language control in the context of L3 acquisition

This book fills an existing gap in the field of third language acquisition (L3A) by bringing together theoretical, empirical, and practical accounts that contribute to informed teaching practices in multilingual classrooms

Program conversing in Portugese providing a library service

TUGA is a program which converses in Portuguese to provide a library service covering the field of Artificial Intelligence. The objective of designing the program TUGA was the development of a feasible method for consulting and creating data bases in natural Portuguese. The resulting program allows dialogues where the program and its users behave in the way humans normally do in a dialogue setting. The program can answer/ and question in pre-defined scenarios. Users can question/ answer and issue commands in a natural and convenient way/ without bothering excessively with the form of the dialogues and sentences. The original contributions of this work are: the treatment of dialogues. the adaptation of Colmerauer's natural language framework to Portuguese, the particular method for evaluating the logical structures involved in Colmerauer's framework, and the library service application itself. The program is implemented in Prolog, a simple and surprisingly powerful programming language essentially identical in syntax and semantics to a subset of predicate calculus in clausal form

From Verbs to Tasks: An Integrated Account of Learning Tasks from Situated Interactive Instruction.

Intelligent collaborative agents are becoming common in the human society. From virtual assistants such as Siri and Google Now to assistive robots, they contribute to human activities in a variety of ways. As they become more pervasive, the challenge of customizing them to a variety of environments and tasks becomes critical. It is infeasible for engineers to program them for each individual use. Our research aims at building interactive robots and agents that adapt to new environments autonomously by interacting with human users using natural modalities. This dissertation studies the problem of learning novel tasks from human-agent dialog. We propose a novel approach for interactive task learning, situated interactive instruction (SII), and investigate approaches to three computational challenges that arise in designing SII agents: situated comprehension, mixed-initiative interaction, and interactive task learning. We propose a novel mixed-modality grounded representation for task verbs which encompasses their lexical, semantic, and task-oriented aspects. This representation is useful in situated comprehension and can be learned through human-agent interactions. We introduce the Indexical Model of comprehension that can exploit extra-linguistic contexts for resolving semantic ambiguities in situated comprehension of task commands. The Indexical model is integrated with a mixed-initiative interaction model that facilitates a flexible task-oriented human-agent dialog. This dialog serves as the basis of interactive task learning. We propose an interactive variation of explanation-based learning that can acquire the proposed representation. We demonstrate that our learning paradigm is efficient, can transfer knowledge between structurally similar tasks, integrates agent-driven exploration with instructional learning, and can acquire several tasks. The methods proposed in this thesis are integrated in Rosie - a generally instructable agent developed in the Soar cognitive architecture and embodied on a table-top robot.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111573/1/shiwali_1.pd

The dynamic relationship of sentence complexity, childhood stuttering, and grammatical development

The present study was conducted to determine if the relationship between grammatical complexity and childhood stuttering is influenced by grammatical development. The study was cross-sectional in design and observed the spontaneous speech of six children who stutter ranging in age from 32 to 46 months. The first 100 utterances from each subject\u27s sample were scored using Scarborough\u27s (1990) Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) and given a numerical score which was used as an indicator of grammatical development in place of the child\u27s age. The first one-hundred sentences containing a noun and verb in subject-predicate relationship were extracted from each sample and coded for their grammatical complexity using Lee\u27s (1973) Developmental Sentence Score. The utterances were also measured for the length in morphemes. Sample utterances were then separated into two categories: fluent and stuttered. Results showed that when conducting group comparisons the mean complexity levels of fluent and stuttered utterances were significantly different. The difference in complexity levels of the fluent and stuttered utterances, however, was not found to be significant when the length of the utterance was held constant. To determine if the difference in sentence complexity of fluent and stuttered utterances was related to age and/or IPSyn, bivariate correlation analyses were conducted. Results showed that the differences between the mean complexity levels of the fluent and stuttered utterances were not significantly correlated with grammatical development. However, an apparent correlation was observed when depicted in graph form. It was found that the difference in complexity of fluent and stuttered utterances became more apparent as a child increased in grammatical development. Findings suggest that as a child\u27s grammatical repertoire expands, simpler sentence forms are fluent while the newly acquired sentence forms are dysfluent. Findings suggest that the incidence of stuttering shifts along a developmental continuum, occurring more often on the child\u27s emerging grammar forms

Children's comprehension of double negation

"A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, April 28, 1995."Also available in print.Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 1995published_or_final_versionSpeech and Hearing SciencesBachelorBachelor of Science in Speech and Hearing Science

GROUNDING IN FACE-TO-FACE CONVERSATION: AN ETHNOGRAPHY STUDY

Grounding is the process of achieving mutual understanding or belief about what was said between participants in a conversation. Its role is of a paramount important in communication to succeed. This paper examines the models of grounding styles that commonly occur among the teens. The study employed qualitative approach to analyze specific utterances using Clark’s and Traum’s theories of grounding in communication. The research has shown the use of tag questions is less than the use of interrogative forms. The switch of topic dialogue from an uninformative to informative one is another grounding style that the respondents adopted

Interpretation of Clitic, Strong and Null Pronouns in the Acquisition of European Portuguese

The goal of the present research was to investigate how the interpretation of clitic, strong and null pronouns by Portuguese preschool children is influenced by the grammatical status of those forms. In a first study, picture verification tasks were used in order to verify if the categorial status of object pronominal forms (clitic or strong) is intralinguistically relevant in European Portuguese (EP), especially in contexts of variation between non-reflexives and reflexives. According to the results, children did not have major difficulties with reflexive forms (anaphors), regardless of their clitic or strong status. In the interpretation of non-reflexive forms, their performance got close to the adults’ behavior with clitic pronouns, while it deviated with strong pronouns in prepositional contexts. Children overaccepted dispreferred coreferential readings when interpreting non-reflexive strong object pronouns in non-locative PPs. In a second study, truth value judgment tasks were applied with the intention of specifying if there is an interpretative asymmetry between null and overt pronominal subjects in indicative and subjunctive complement clauses. The results show that, in the indicative (with one or two intrasentential antecedents), children overaccepted the pragmatically inappropriate reading of coreference for overt strong subject pronouns, unlike adults. Children performed more adult-like with null subject pronouns in indicative clauses, when there is only one intrasentential antecedent (the matrix subject). However, they often accepted the dispreferred reading of disjoint reference with null pronominal subjects in the indicative, in the presence of two potential antecedents before the pronoun (the matrix subject and the matrix object). In the subjunctive (selected by volitional verbs or declarative verbs of order), children incorrectly assigned coreferential readings to both null and overt subject pronouns. Strong pronominal forms are argued to be licensed post-syntactically. The difficulties in the post-syntactic rejection of the dispreferred coreference when interpreting object and embedded subject strong pronouns (constrained by semantic and/or pragmatic factors) are based on processing problems at the interface level. Here, there is competition between convergent derivations and the comparison between those structures is costly for children’s limited working memory. In turn, clitic and null pronouns are licensed in syntax (making the establishment of the referential dependency of these forms to be more economical), since both are dependent on functional categories as inflection. However, there are some processing constraints in the interpretation of null pronominal subjects in indicative clauses, when the matrix object antecedent linearly intervenes in the referential dependency between the preferred matrix subject antecedent and the null embedded subject pronoun. In this case, children’s performance is guided by the linear proximity of the matrix object antecedent preceding the null pronoun. The subjunctive obviation (with both types of subject pronouns) is not completely acquired yet by children. Nevertheless, they show sensitivity to the contrast between the indicative and the subjunctive. The full mastery of obviation involves not only syntactic knowledge of the anaphoric nature of Tense (e.g. Meireles & Raposo, 1983) but also lexical and semantic knowledge of the matrix verbs, which takes some time to acquire. In the pronominal system, the more pronouns are syntactically licensed, the less problematic their acquisition becomes.O objetivo do presente estudo foi investigar como a interpretação de pronomes clíticos, fortes e nulos por crianças portuguesas em idade pré-escolar é influenciada pelo estatuto gramatical dessas formas. Num primeiro estudo, foram utilizadas tarefas de verificação de imagens a fim de verificar se o estatuto categorial da forma pronominal em posição de complemento (clítico ou forte) é relevante intralinguisticamente em Português Europeu (PE), designadamente em contextos de variação entre não-reflexos e reflexos. De acordo com os resultados, as crianças não têm grandes dificuldades com formas reflexas (anáforas), independentemente do seu estatuto clítico ou forte. Na interpretação de formas não-reflexas, o seu desempenho aproximou-se do dos adultos com os pronomes clíticos mas desviou-se com os pronomes fortes em contextos preposicionais. As crianças sobreaceitaram leituras correferenciais não-preferidas ao interpretar pronomes fortes complemento não-reflexos em sintagmas preposicionais não-locativos. Num segundo estudo, foram aplicadas tarefas de juízo de valor de verdade com a intenção de especificar se há uma assimetria interpretativa entre sujeitos pronominais nulos e plenos em orações completivas com indicativo e conjuntivo. Os resultados mostram que, no indicativo (com um ou dois antecedentes intrafrásicos), as crianças sobreaceitaram a leitura pragmaticamente inadequada de correferência para pronomes sujeito plenos, ao contrário dos adultos. As crianças aproximaram-se do desempenho dos adultos com pronomes sujeito nulos em orações com indicativo, quando há um só antecedente intrafrásico (o sujeito matriz). Contudo, aceitaram frequentemente a leitura disjunta não-preferida com sujeitos pronominais nulos no indicativo, na presença de dois potenciais antecedentes na frase (o sujeito matriz e o objeto matriz). No conjuntivo (selecionado por verbos volitivos e declarativos de ordem), as crianças atribuíram incorretamente leituras correferenciais a ambas as formas de pronome sujeito (nulo e pleno). Argumentamos que as formas pronominais fortes são licenciadas pós-sintaticamente. As dificuldades na rejeição pós-sintática da correferência não-preferida ao interpretar pronomes fortes em posição de complemento e de sujeito encaixado (restringinda por fatores semânticos e/ou pragmáticos) são baseadas em problemas de processamento ao nível das interfaces. Aqui, há competição entre derivações convergentes e a comparação entre essas estruturas envolve custos para a limitada memória de trabalho das crianças. Por sua vez, os pronomes clíticos e nulos são licenciados na sintaxe (fazendo com que o estabelecimento da dependência referencial destas formas seja mais económica), pois ambos são dependentes de categorias funcionais como a flexão. No entanto, existem algumas restrições de processamento na interpretação dos sujeitos pronominais nulos em orações com indicativo, quando o antecedente objeto matriz intervém de forma linear na dependência referencial entre o antecedente sujeito matriz preferido e o pronome sujeito nulo encaixado. Neste caso, o desempenho das crianças é guiado pela proximidade linear do antecedente objeto matriz que precede o pronome nulo. A obviação conjuntiva (com ambos os tipos de pronome sujeito) não está ainda completamente adquirida pelas crianças. Todavia, mostram sensibilidade ao contraste entre o indicativo e o conjuntivo. O domínio completo da obviação envolve não só conhecimento sintático do caráter anafórico de Tempo (e.g. Meireles & Raposo, 1983) mas também conhecimento lexical e semântico dos verbos matriz, o que demora algum tempo a adquirir. No sistema pronominal, quanto mais os pronomes são sintaticamente licenciados, menos problemática se torna a sua aquisição

Analysis of Mathematics Curriculum Materials to Ascertain the Potential for Students to Develop Agency and Autonomy

Mathematics textbooks are commonly used around the world to teach mathematics during lessons. They provide mathematical tasks and theory to support student learning. Given the centrality of textbooks as a vehicle for mathematics teaching and learning, prior research has examined ways in which texts support students’ learning of a wide variety of mathematics knowledge and skills. Less examined, however, has been the potential role of textbooks in supporting development of agency and autonomy relation to mathematics learning. This dissertation examined the treatment of functions in two textbook series to identify ways that each positions students to develop distinct forms of agency and autonomy while solving mathematical tasks. To study how the two textbook series position students to develop agency and autonomy, I investigated and systematically categorized the types of mathematical tasks and the linguistic structures found in the texts. The mathematical task features were examined from a cognitive perspective drawing on analysis of tasks with different levels of cognitive demand. The linguistic analysis drew on Systemic Functional Linguistics. Data consisted of selected lessons on chapters on the topic of functions. The findings show that for the topic of functions, both textbook series provide students with opportunities to develop agency and autonomy that align with the instructional orientations each text supports. One textbook series supports a so-called reform-oriented approach to teaching and learning whereas the other supports a traditional-oriented approach. One textbook series also positioned students to develop greater varieties of agency and autonomy than the other. For example, for the topic of functions, this textbook series provides students with a broader range of tasks than the other textbook series. These include simpler tasks that develop disciplinary agency and more complex and challenging tasks that develop conceptual agency and intellectual autonomy. The findings contribute to an understanding of different ways textbook series with particular orientations make opportunities available for students to develop forms of agency and autonomy during classroom learning. The findings also contribute to methodology for analyzing textbooks based on the mathematical tasks and other supporting texts for a lesson.PHDEducational StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143905/1/yankson_1.pd