A study of turn-yelding cues in human-computer dialogue

Previous research has made signi cant advances in under- standing how humans manage to engage in smooth, well-coordinated conversation, and have unveiled the existence of several turn-yielding cues | lexico-syntactic, prosodic and acoustic events that may serve as predictors of conversational turn nality. These results have subse- quently aided the re nement of turn-taking pro ciency of spoken dia- logue systems. In this study, we nd empirical evidence in a corpus of human-computer dialogues that human users produce the same kinds of turn-yielding cues that have been observed in human-human interac- tions. We also show that a linear relation holds between the number of individual cues conjointly displayed and the likelihood of a turn switch.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

A study of turn-yelding cues in human-computer dialogue

Previous research has made signi cant advances in under- standing how humans manage to engage in smooth, well-coordinated conversation, and have unveiled the existence of several turn-yielding cues | lexico-syntactic, prosodic and acoustic events that may serve as predictors of conversational turn nality. These results have subse- quently aided the re nement of turn-taking pro ciency of spoken dia- logue systems. In this study, we nd empirical evidence in a corpus of human-computer dialogues that human users produce the same kinds of turn-yielding cues that have been observed in human-human interac- tions. We also show that a linear relation holds between the number of individual cues conjointly displayed and the likelihood of a turn switch.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Spanish DAL: A Spanish Dictionary of Affect in Language

The topic of sentiment analysis in text has been extensively studied in the English language for the past 30 years. An early, influential work by Cynthia Whissell, the Dictionary of Affect in Language (DAL), allows rating words along three dimensions: pleasantness, activation and imagery. Given the lack of such tools in Spanish, we decided to replicate Whissell’s work in that language. This report describes the Spanish DAL, a Spanish lexicon formed by more than 2500 words manually rated by humans along the same three dimensions. We evaluated its usefulness on two sentiment analysis tasks, which showed that our lexicon managed to capture relevant information regarding the three affective dimensions.Fil:Gravano, A. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales. Departamento de ComputaciónFil:Dell’Amerlina Ríos, Matías G. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales. Departamento de Computació

A pivotal prefix based filtering algorithm for string similarity search

We study the string similarity search problem with edit-distance constraints, which, given a set of data strings and a query string, finds the similar strings to the query. Ex-isting algorithms use a signature-based framework. They first generate signatures for each string and then prune the dissimilar strings which have no common signatures to the query. However existing methods involve large numbers of signatures and many signatures are unnecessary. Reduc-ing the number of signatures not only increases the pruning power but also decreases the filtering cost. To address this problem, we propose a novel pivotal prefix filter which sig-nificantly reduces the number of signatures. We prove the pivotal filter achieves larger pruning power and less filter-ing cost than state-of-the-art filters. We develop a dynamic programming method to select high-quality pivotal prefix signatures to prune dissimilar strings with non-consecutive errors to the query. We propose an alignment filter that considers the alignments between signatures to prune large numbers of dissimilar pairs with consecutive errors to the query. Experimental results on three real datasets show that our method achieves high performance and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by an order of magnitude

A study of turn-yelding cues in human-computer dialogue

Previous research has made signi cant advances in under- standing how humans manage to engage in smooth, well-coordinated conversation, and have unveiled the existence of several turn-yielding cues | lexico-syntactic, prosodic and acoustic events that may serve as predictors of conversational turn nality. These results have subse- quently aided the re nement of turn-taking pro ciency of spoken dia- logue systems. In this study, we nd empirical evidence in a corpus of human-computer dialogues that human users produce the same kinds of turn-yielding cues that have been observed in human-human interac- tions. We also show that a linear relation holds between the number of individual cues conjointly displayed and the likelihood of a turn switch.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Continuous Interaction with a Virtual Human

Attentive Speaking and Active Listening require that a Virtual Human be capable of simultaneous perception/interpretation and production of communicative behavior. A Virtual Human should be able to signal its attitude and attention while it is listening to its interaction partner, and be able to attend to its interaction partner while it is speaking – and modify its communicative behavior on-the-fly based on what it perceives from its partner. This report presents the results of a four week summer project that was part of eNTERFACE’10. The project resulted in progress on several aspects of continuous interaction such as scheduling and interrupting multimodal behavior, automatic classification of listener responses, generation of response eliciting behavior, and models for appropriate reactions to listener responses. A pilot user study was conducted with ten participants. In addition, the project yielded a number of deliverables that are released for public access

Competition Breeds Desire

Desire spurs competition; here we explore whether the converse is also true. In one study, female quartets (N = 58) completed anagrams, with the winner to receive compact speakers; controls anagrammed without competition. In the other study, female quartets (N = 74) described their ideal first date to a male judge, who chose the best description; controls read to him others' date descriptions without competition. In both studies, creating competition increased desire and altered how much participants wanted, but not how much they liked, the competed-for thing. Competition may activate a general “wanting system,” producing overvaluing in settings from stock markets to partner selection