On the Influence of Gender on Interruptions in Multiparty Dialogue

During conversations, participants do not always alternate turns smoothly. One cause of disturbance particularly prominent in multiparty dialogue is the presence of interruptions: interventions that prevent current speakers from finishing their turns. Previous work, mostly within the field of sociolinguistics, has suggested that the gender of the dialogue participants plays an important role in their interruptive behaviour. We investigate existing hypotheses in this respect by systematically analysing interruptions in a corpus of spoken multiparty meetings that include a minimum of two male and two female participants. We find a number of significant differences, including the fact that women are more often interrupted overall and that men interrupt more often women than other men, in particular using speech overlap to grab the floor. We do not find evidence for the hypothesis that women interrupt other women more frequently than they interrupt men

A Semantic Distance based Architecture for a Guesser Agent in ESSENCE's Location Taboo Challenge

Taboo is a word-guessing game in which one player has to describe a target term to another player by giving hints that are neither the target term nor other terms specified in a predetermined list of taboo words. The Location Taboo (LT) Challenge, which has been proposed by the ESSENCE Marie Curie Initial Training Network, is a version of Taboo that only contains cities as target terms and is intended to be played by artificial guesser agents. The hints are extracted from games played by many different human players, whose associations of cities with specific terms are often based on past experiences and therefore very diverse. Modeling this diversity in word associations is one of the main difficulties in solving the LT Challenge. In this paper, we propose a semantic distance based architecture for a guesser agent for the LT Challenge. The proposed architecture employs a two-step approach that narrows down the geographical area of the guess first to the country and then to the city. For ranking countries and cities, different distance metrics are used. As these techniques can be used on web documents crafted by many different individuals, they are well suited to model the diversity in word associations. The results of our evaluation on the LTC test set show that the proposed guesser agent can guess the target city with up to 23.17% accuracy. For 68% of the correct guesses, the proposed agent guesses the target city faster than its human counterpart

Monitoring and analysis of technology transfer and intellectual property regimes and their use: results of a study carried out on behalf of the European Commission (DG Research)

This report presents the results of a three-year study commissioned by the European Commission (DG Research) regarding the monitoring, analysis and use of technology transfer and intellectual property regimes in the European Union. This study was organised in the context of the 6th Framework Programme for R&D, and was jointly carried out by law firms Mason Hayes+Curran (Dublin) and DLA Piper (Brussels)