Dialogue based interfaces for universal access.

Conversation provides an excellent means of communication for almost all people. Consequently, a conversational interface is an excellent mechanism for allowing people to interact with systems. Conversational systems are an active research area, but a wide range of systems can be developed with current technology. More sophisticated interfaces can take considerable effort, but simple interfaces can be developed quite rapidly. This paper gives an introduction to the current state of the art of conversational systems and interfaces. It describes a methodology for developing conversational interfaces and gives an example of an interface for a state benefits web site. The paper discusses how this interface could improve access for a wide range of people, and how further development of this interface would allow a larger range of people to use the system and give them more functionality

‘In the dark’: Voices of parents in marginalised stepfamilies: perceptions and experiences of their parenting support needs

The fastest growing family type in the UK is the stepfamily with social parenting an increasingly normal practice. Parenting policy and practice, which has increased exponentially over the last two decades, has historically been modelled on the biological nuclear family model with marginalised families the main recipients. The possibility that parents in marginalised stepfamilies might have separate and discrete parenting support needs to biological parents seems to be overlooked in policy, practice and research. Rather, the historical legacy of deficit, dysfunction and a ‘whiff’ of poor parenting in marginalised stepfamilies lingers on. The focus of the research was to determine marginalised parents’ perceptions and experiences of parenting in their stepfamily and their parenting support needs. Thematic analysis of the data revealed accounts that were interwoven throughout with strong moral undertones which seemed to categorise their lives. The parenting issues were different and more complex than those they had encountered before. The parents adopted biological family identities, but these didn’t fit with their social roles and often rendered them powerless in their relationships with stepchildren. This appeared to have a cumulative effect which impacted on the already fragile couple relationship. Despite the parents easy articulation of the parenting issues there was a contrasting unease and ambivalence in discussing parenting support needs. Parenting support seemed to be an irrelevance that could be disregarded. Ultimately the moral significance of the parents marginalised class positions appeared to be central to their lives, which has important implications for policy and practice

The absolute abundance calibration project: the <i>Lycopodium</i> marker-grain method put to the test

Traditionally, dinoflagellate cyst concentrations are calculated by adding an exotic marker or “spike” (such as Lycopodium clavatum) to each sample following the method of Stockmarr (1971). According to Maher (1981), the total error is controlled mainly by the error on the count of Lycopodium clavatum spores. In general, the more L. clavatum spores counted, the lower the error. A dinocyst / L. clavatum spore ratio of ~2 will give optimal results in terms of precision and time spent on a sample. It has also been proven that the use of the aliquot method yields comparable results to the marker-grain method (de Vernal et al., 1987). Critical evaluation of the effect of different laboratory procedures on the marker grain concentration in each sample has never been executed. Although, it has been reported that different processing methods (e.g. ultrasonication, oxidizing, etc.) are to a certain extent damaging to microfossils (e.g. Hodgkinson, 1991), it is not clear how this is translated into concentration calculations. It is wellknown from the literature that concentration calculations of dinoflagellate cysts from different laboratories are hard to resolve into a consistent picture. The aim of this study is to remove these inconsistencies and to make recommendations for the use of a standardized methodology. Sediment surface samples from four different localities (North Sea, Celtic Sea, NW Africa and Benguela) were macerated in different laboratories each using its own palynological maceration technique. A fixed amount of Lycopodium clavatum tablets was added to each sample. The uses of different preparation methodologies (sieving, ultrasonicating, oxidizing …) are compared using both concentrations – calculated from Lycopodium tablets - and relative abundances (more destructive methods will increase the amount of resistant taxa). Additionally, this study focuses on some important taxonomic issues, since obvious interlaboratorial differences in nomenclature are recorded

Does Environmental Enrichment Reduce Stress? An Integrated Measure of Corticosterone from Feathers Provides a Novel Perspective

Enrichment is widely used as tool for managing fearfulness, undesirable behaviors, and stress in captive animals, and for studying exploration and personality. Inconsistencies in previous studies of physiological and behavioral responses to enrichment led us to hypothesize that enrichment and its removal are stressful environmental changes to which the hormone corticosterone and fearfulness, activity, and exploration behaviors ought to be sensitive. We conducted two experiments with a captive population of wild-caught Clark's nutcrackers (Nucifraga columbiana) to assess responses to short- (10-d) and long-term (3-mo) enrichment, their removal, and the influence of novelty, within the same animal. Variation in an integrated measure of corticosterone from feathers, combined with video recordings of behaviors, suggests that how individuals perceive enrichment and its removal depends on the duration of exposure. Short- and long-term enrichment elicited different physiological responses, with the former acting as a stressor and birds exhibiting acclimation to the latter. Non-novel enrichment evoked the strongest corticosterone responses of all the treatments, suggesting that the second exposure to the same objects acted as a physiological cue, and that acclimation was overridden by negative past experience. Birds showed weak behavioral responses that were not related to corticosterone. By demonstrating that an integrated measure of glucocorticoid physiology varies significantly with changes to enrichment in the absence of agonistic interactions, our study sheds light on potential mechanisms driving physiological and behavioral responses to environmental change

Compact and Interpretable Dialogue State Representation with Genetic Sparse Distributed Memory

International audiencet User satisfaction is often considered as the objective that should be achieved by spoken dialogue systems. This is why, the reward function of Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS) trained by Reinforcement Learning (RL) is often designed to reflect user satisfaction. To do so, the state space representation should be based on features capturing user satisfaction characteristics such as the mean speech recognition confidence score for instance. On the other hand, for deployment in industrial systems, there is a need for state representations that are understandable by system engineers. In this paper, we propose to represent the state space using a Genetic Sparse Distributed Memory. This is a state aggregation method computing state prototypes which are selected so as to lead to the best linear representation of the value function in RL. To do so, previous work on Genetic Sparse Distributed Memory for classification is adapted to the Reinforcement Learning task and a new way of building the prototypes is proposed. The approach is tested on a corpus of dialogues collected with an appointment scheduling system. The results are compared to a grid-based linear parametrisation. It is shown that learning is accelerated and made more memory efficient. It is also shown that the framework is calable in that it is possible to include many dialogue features in the representation, interpret the resulting policy and identify the most important dialogue features

Using Modality Replacement to Facilitate Communication between Visually and Hearing-Impaired People

Using sign language, speech, and haptics as communication modalities, a virtual treasure-hunting game serves as an entertainment and educational tool for visually and hearing impaired users. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in human-computer interaction (HCI) for multimodal interfaces. Since Sutherland's SketchPad in 1961 and Xerox's Alto in 1973, computer users have long been acquainted with technol ogies other than the traditional keyboard for interacting with a system. Recently, with the desire for increased productivity, seamless in teraction, immersion, and e-inclusion of people with disabilities, along with progress in fields such as multimedia, multimodal signal analy sis, and HCI, multimodal interaction has emerged as an active field of research

2020 vision Liberalism and globalisation

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:m01/34769 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

A corpus for studying addressing behavior in multi-party dialogues

This paper describes a multi-modal corpus of hand-annotated meeting dialogues that was designed for studying addressing behavior in face-to-face conversations. The corpus contains annotated dialogue acts, addressees, adjacency pairs and gaze direction. First, we describe the corpus design where we present the annotation schema, annotation tools and annotation process itself. Then, we analyze the reproducibility and stability of the annotation schema