Design, development and demonstration of a warm gas distribution system Quarterly report, period ending 31 Mar. 1968

Component tests and system assembly for hydrazine fuel gas distribution system of torque generator for spacecraft attitude contro

Do (and say) as I say: Linguistic adaptation in human-computer dialogs

© Theodora Koulouri, Stanislao Lauria, and Robert D. Macredie. This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.There is strong research evidence showing that people naturally align to each other’s vocabulary, sentence structure, and acoustic features in dialog, yet little is known about how the alignment mechanism operates in the interaction between users and computer systems let alone how it may be exploited to improve the efficiency of the interaction. This article provides an account of lexical alignment in human–computer dialogs, based on empirical data collected in a simulated human–computer interaction scenario. The results indicate that alignment is present, resulting in the gradual reduction and stabilization of the vocabulary-in-use, and that it is also reciprocal. Further, the results suggest that when system and user errors occur, the development of alignment is temporarily disrupted and users tend to introduce novel words to the dialog. The results also indicate that alignment in human–computer interaction may have a strong strategic component and is used as a resource to compensate for less optimal (visually impoverished) interaction conditions. Moreover, lower alignment is associated with less successful interaction, as measured by user perceptions. The article distills the results of the study into design recommendations for human–computer dialog systems and uses them to outline a model of dialog management that supports and exploits alignment through mechanisms for in-use adaptation of the system’s grammar and lexicon

The aligned rank transform for nonparametric factorial analyses using only anova procedures

Nonparametric data from multi-factor experiments arise often in human-computer interaction (HCI). Examples may include error counts, Likert responses, and preference tallies. But because multiple factors are involved, common nonparametric tests (e.g., Friedman) are inadequate, as they are unable to examine interaction effects. While some statistical techniques exist to handle such data, these techniques are not widely available and are complex. To address these concerns, we present the Aligned Rank Transform (ART) for nonparametric factorial data analysis in HCI. The ART relies on a preprocessing step that “aligns” data before applying averaged ranks, after which point common ANOVA procedures can be used, making the ART accessible to anyone familiar with the F-test. Unlike most articles on the ART, which only address two factors, we generalize the ART to N factors. We also provide ARTool and ARTweb, desktop and Web-based programs for aligning and ranking data. Our re-examination of some published HCI results exhibits advantages of the ART

Emotion rating from short blog texts

Being able to automatically perceive a variety of emotions from text alone has potentially important applications in CMC and HCI that range from identifying mood from online posts to enabling dynamically adaptive interfaces. However, such ability has not been proven in human raters or computational systems. Here we examine the ability of naive raters of emotion to detect one of eight emotional categories from 50 and 200 word samples of real blog text. Using expert raters as a ‘gold standard’, naive-expert rater agreement increased with longer texts, and was high for ratings of joy, disgust, anger and anticipation, but low for acceptance and ‘neutral ’ texts. We discuss these findings in light of theories of CMC and potential applications in HCI