"Shouldn't I use a polarquestion?" Proper Question Forms Disentangling Inconsistencies in Dialogue Systems

This work reports on the description of a specific class of clarification requests, adopted for the negotiation of pieces of information part of the common ground for argumentation strategies in human-machine interaction. Two studies are carried out to prove the adequateness of a specific form of polar question in a specific pragmatic situation, where a presupposition is contradicted by a new evidence. Whereas the first one proves the appropriateness of the negative form, the second one also demonstrate how the use of such a form, in the aforementioned pragmatic situation, can affect the principle of robustness, in terms of observability and recoverability, important in human–machine interaction applications. Given the results obtained in the two studies, dialogue systems with such capabilities are, therefore, a desirable goal, as they are expected to lead to improved usability and naturalness in conversation. For this reason, I present here a system capable of detecting conflicts and of using argumentation strategies to signal them consistently with previous observations

Daniela De Liso, “Da Masaniello a Eleonora Pimentel. Napoli tra storia e letteratura”, Napoli, Loffredo, 2016, 288 pp.

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Silent pauses as clarification trigger

Among possible pragmatic feedback an interlocutor can use to acknowledge the degree of understanding of an utterance, clarification requests (CRs) are to be considered. The functional role of CRs can furthermore be expressed via silent pauses - or failed turn-giving moves - which express an understanding problem and are solved through a clarify speech act. In this work, we therefore hypothesise that some silent pauses, in specific conditions, may also have an interactional role which is interpreted by the speaker as a clarification need

Lessons Learned from EVALITA 2020 and Thirteen Years of Evaluation of Italian Language Technology

This paper provides a summary of the 7th Evaluation Campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for Italian (EVALITA2020) which was held online on December 17th, due to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. The 2020 edition of Evalita included 14 different tasks belonging to five research areas, namely: (i) Affect, Hate, and Stance, (ii) Creativity and Style, (iii) New Challenges in Long-standing Tasks, (iv) Semantics and Multimodality, (v) Time and Diachrony. This paper provides a description of the tasks and the key findings from the analysis of participant outcomes. Moreover, it provides a detailed analysis of the participants and task organizers which demonstrates the growing interest with respect to this campaign. Finally, a detailed analysis of the evaluation of tasks across the past seven editions is provided; this allows to assess how the research carried out by the Italian community dealing with Computational Linguistics has evolved in terms of popular tasks and paradigms during the last 13 years