A comparison of addressee detection methods for multiparty conversations

Several algorithms have recently been proposed for recognizing addressees in a group conversational setting. These algorithms can rely on a variety of factors including previous conversational roles, gaze and type of dialogue act. Both statistical supervised machine learning algorithms as well as rule based methods have been developed. In this paper, we compare several algorithms developed for several different genres of muliparty dialogue, and propose a new synthesis algorithm that matches the performance of machine learning algorithms while maintaning the transparancy of semantically meaningfull rule-based algorithms

Who is "you"? Combining linguistic and gaze features to resolve second-person references in dialogue

We explore the problem of resolving the second person English pronoun you in multi-party dialogue, using a combination of linguistic and visual features. First, we distinguish generic and referential uses, then we classify the referential uses as either plural or singular, and finally, for the latter cases, we identify the addressee. In our first set of experiments, the linguistic and visual features are derived from manual transcriptions and annotations, but in the second set, they are generated through entirely automatic means. Results show that a multimodal system is often preferable to a unimodal one

Hey, y\u27guys! : A diachronic usage-based approach to changes in American English address

This dissertation adopts a functional, usage-based perspective on language to highlight key changes in American English address over the past century, especially the development of \u27you guys\u27 and its expansion across second-person plural contexts. Based on data from the Corpus of Historical American English and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (among other corpora), the study tracks the increasing usage, gradual restructuring, semantic generalization, and shifting registers of \u27you guys\u27, including the interactions of those changes as the form has grammaticalized. This work offers an explanation, therefore, as to why \u27you guys\u27 has been uniquely reshaped into a pronominal unit with non-masculine meanings in American English, while other appositive uses such as \u27you men\u27 and \u27you fellows\u27 have retained their structural and semantic properties with far greater fidelity