The effect of linguistic and visual salience in visual world studies

Research using the visual world paradigm has demonstrated that visual input has a rapid effect on language interpretation tasks such as reference resolution and, conversely, that linguistic material-including verbs, prepositions and adjectives-can influence fixations to potential referents. More recent research has started to explore how this effect of linguistic input on fixations is mediated by properties of the visual stimulus, in particular by visual salience. In the present study we further explored the role of salience in the visual world paradigm manipulating language-driven salience and visual salience. Specifically, we tested how linguistic salience (i.e., the greater accessibility of linguistically introduced entities) and visual salience (bottom-up attention grabbing visual aspects) interact. We recorded participants' eye-movements during a MapTask, asking them to look from landmark to landmark displayed upon a map while hearing direction-giving instructions. The landmarks were of comparable size and color, except in the Visual Salience condition, in which one landmark had been made more visually salient. In the Linguistic Salience conditions, the instructions included references to an object not on the map. Response times and fixations were recorded. Visual Salience influenced the time course of fixations at both the beginning and the end of the trial but did not show a significant effect on response times. Linguistic Salience reduced response times and increased fixations to landmarks when they were associated to a Linguistic Salient entity not present itself on the map. When the target landmark was both visually and linguistically salient, it was fixated longer, but fixations were quicker when the target item was linguistically salient only. Our results suggest that the two types of salience work in parallel and that linguistic salience affects fixations even when the entity is not visually present. © 2014 Cavicchio, Melcher and Poesio

Compositionality in the language of emotion

Emotions are signaled by complex arrays of face and body actions. The main point of contention in contemporary treatments is whether these arrays are discrete, holistic constellations reflecting emotion categories, or whether they are compositional-comprised of smaller components, each of which contributes some aspect of emotion to the complex whole. We address this question by investigating spontaneous face and body displays of athletes and place it in the wider context of human communicative signals and, in particular, of language. A defining property of human language is compositionality-the ability to combine and recombine a relatively small number of elements to create a vast number of complex meaningful expressions, and to interpret them. We ask whether this property of language can be discerned in a more ancient communicative system: intense emotional displays. In an experiment, participants interpreted a range of emotions and their strengths in pictures of athletes who had just won or lost a competition. By matching participants' judgements with minutely coded features of face and body, we find evidence for compositionality. The distribution of participants' responses indicates that most of the athletes' face and body features contribute to displays of dominance or submission. More particular emotional components related, for example, to positive valence (e.g. happy) or goal obstruction (e.g. frustrated), were also found to significantly correlate with certain face and body features. We propose that the combination of features linked to broader components (i.e, dominant or submissive) and to more particular emotions (e.g, happy or frustrated) reflects more complex emotional states. In sum, we find that the corporeal expression of intense, unfiltered emotion has compositional properties, potentially providing an ancient scaffolding upon which, millions of years later, the abstract and constrained compositional system of human language could build

Optimizing the order of taxon addition in phylogenetic tree construction using genetic algorithm

Abstract. Phylogenetics has gained in public favor for the analysis of DNA sequence data as molecular biology has advanced. Among a number of algorithms for phylogenetics, the fastDNAml is considered to have reasonable computational cost and performance. However, it has a defect that its performance is likely to be significantly affected by the order of taxon addition. In this paper, we propose a genetic algorithm for optimizing the order of taxon addition in the fastDNAml. Experimental results show that the fastDNAml with the optimized order of taxon addition constructs more probable evolutionary trees in terms of the maximum likelihood.

(Non)cooperative dialogues: The role of emotions

Objective: The effect of emotion on (non)cooperation in unscripted, ecological communication is investigated. Background: The participants in an interaction are generally cooperative in that, for instance, they tend to reduce the chance of misunderstandings in communication. However, it is also clear that cooperation is not complete. Positive and negative emotional states also appear to be connected to the participants commitment to cooperate or not, respectively. So far, however, it has proven remarkably difficult to test this because of the lack of entirely objective measurements of both cooperation levels and emotional responses.Method: In this article, the authors present behavioral methods and coding schemes for analyzing cooperation and (surface) indicators of emotions in face-to-face interactions and show that they can be used to study the correlation between emotions and cooperation effectively. Results: The authors bserved large negative correlations between heart rate and cooperation, and a group of facial expressions was found to be predictive of the level of cooperation of the speakers. Conclusion: It is possible to develop reliable methods to code for cooperation, and with such coding schemes it is possible to confirm the commonsense prediction that oncooperative behavior by a conversational participant affects the other participant in ways that can be measured quantitatively. Application: These results shed light on an aspect of interaction that is crucial to building adaptive systems able to measure cooperation and to respond to the users affective states. The authors expect their methods to be applicable to building and testing such interaction systems. Copyright © 2012, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society

Irony in a judicial debate: Analyzing the subtleties of irony while testing the subtleties of an annotation scheme

Irony has been studied by famous scholars across centuries, as well as more recently in cognitive and pragmatic research. The prosodic and visual signals of irony were also studied. Irony is a communicative act in which the Sender''s literal goal is to communicate a meaning x, but through this meaning the Sender has the goal to communicate another meaning, y, which is contrasting, sometimes even opposite, to meaning x. In this case we have an antiphrastic irony. So an ironic act is an indirect speech act, in that its true meaning, the one really intended by the Sender, is not the one communicated by the literal meaning of the communicative act: it must be understood through inferences by the Addressee. The ironic statement may concern an event, object or person, and in this case, the Addressee, or a third person, or even the Sender itself (Self-irony). In this paper we define irony in terms of a goal and belief view of communication, and show how the annotation scheme, the Anvil-Score, and illustrate aspects of its expressive power by applying it to a particular case: ironic communication in a judicial debate.

Irony in a judicial debate: Analyzing the subtleties of irony while testing the subtleties of an annotation scheme

Irony has been studied by famous scholars across centuries, as well as more recently in cognitive and pragmatic research. The prosodic and visual signals of irony were also studied. Irony is a communicative act in which the Sender's literal goal is to communicate a meaning x, but through this meaning the Sender has the goal to communicate another meaning, y, which is contrasting, sometimes even opposite, to meaning x. In this case we have an antiphrastic irony. So an ironic act is an indirect speech act, in that its true meaning, the one really intended by the Sender, is not the one communicated by the literal meaning of the communicative act: it must be understood through inferences by the Addressee. The ironic statement may concern an event, object or person, and in this case, the Addressee, or a third person, or even the Sender itself (Self-irony). In this paper we define irony in terms of a goal and belief view of communication, and show how the annotation scheme, the Anvil-Score, and illustrate aspects of its expressive power by applying it to a particular case: ironic communication in a judicial debate. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media B.V