Politeness and Alignment in Dialogues with a Virtual Guide

Language alignment is something that happens automatically in dialogues between human speakers. The ability to align is expected to increase the believability of virtual dialogue agents. In this paper we extend the notion of alignment to affective language use, describing a model for dynamically adapting the linguistic style of a virtual agent to the level of politeness and formality detected in the user’s utterances. The model has been implemented in the Virtual Guide, an embodied conversational agent giving directions in a virtual environment. Evaluation shows that our formality model needs improvement, but that the politeness tactics used by the Guide are mostly interpreted as intended, and that the alignment to the user’s language is noticeable

Human Capital Depreciation during Family-related Career Interruptions in Male and Female Occupations

Human Capital Depreciation during Family-related Career Inter¬ruptions in Male and Female Occupations This study investigates the relation between human capital depreciation during family-related career interruptions and occupational choice of women in the (West) German labour market. In contrast to other studies that do not explicitly focus on family-related career interruptions, we find that short-term human capital depreciation during these career interruptions is significantly lower in female occupations than in male occupations. This holds for both high- and low-skilled occupations. Our findings support the self-selection hypothesis with respect to occupational sex segregation, i.e. women might deliberately choose female occupations because of lower short-term wage penalties for family-related career interruptions. Moreover, we find that particularly men employed in high-skilled male occupations face large short-run as well as long run wage penalties when they have a family related career break.education, training and the labour market;

Hilbert space compression for free products and HNN-extensions

Given the Hilbert space compression of two groups, we find bounds on the Hilbert space compression of their free product. We also investigate the Hilbert space compression of an HNN-extension of a group relative to a finite normal subgroup or a finite index subgroup.Comment: 18 page

Gauging CSO groups in N=4 Supergravity

We investigate a class of CSO-gaugings of N=4 supergravity coupled to six vector multiplets. Using the CSO-gaugings we do not find a vacuum that is stable against all scalar perturbations at the point where the matter fields are turned off. However, at this point we do find a stable cosmological scaling solution.Comment: 21 page

An Empirical Connection between the UV Color of Early Type Galaxies and the Stellar Initial Mass Function

Using new UV magnitudes for a sample of early-type galaxies, ETGs, with published stellar mass-to-light ratios, Upsilon_*, we find a correlation between UV color and Upsilon_* that is tighter than those previously identified between Upsilon_* and either the central stellar velocity dispersion, metallicity, or alpha enhancement. The sense of the correlation is that galaxies with larger Upsilon_* are bluer in the UV. We conjecture that differences in the lower mass end of the stellar initial mass function, IMF, are related to the nature of the extreme horizontal branch populations that are generally responsible for the UV flux in ETGs. If so, then UV color can be used to identify ETGs with particular IMF properties and to estimate Upsilon_*.Comment: Submitted for publication in ApJ Letter