The Sensitive Artificial Listner: an induction technique for generating emotionally coloured conversation

The aim of the paper is to document and share an induction technique (The Sensitive Artificial Listener) that generates data that can be both tractable and reasonably naturalistic. The technique focuses on conversation between a human and an agent that either is or appears to be a machine. It is designed to capture a broad spectrum of emotional states, expressed in ‘emotionally coloured discourse’ of the type likely to be displayed in everyday conversation. The technique is based on the observation that it is possible for two people to have a conversation in which one pays little or no attention to the meaning of what the other says, and chooses responses on the basis of superficial cues. In SAL, system responses take the form of a repertoire of stock phrases keyed to the emotional colouring of what the user says. The technique has been used to collect data of sufficient quantity and quality to train machine recognition systems

Global, regional, and national age-sex-specific mortality for 282 causes of death in 195 countries and territories, 1980-2017: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017.

BACKGROUND: Global development goals increasingly rely on country-specific estimates for benchmarking a nation's progress. To meet this need, the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2016 estimated global, regional, national, and, for selected locations, subnational cause-specific mortality beginning in the year 1980. Here we report an update to that study, making use of newly available data and improved methods. GBD 2017 provides a comprehensive assessment of cause-specific mortality for 282 causes in 195 countries and territories from 1980 to 2017. METHODS: The causes of death database is composed of vital registration (VR), verbal autopsy (VA), registry, survey, police, and surveillance data. GBD 2017 added ten VA studies, 127 country-years of VR data, 502 cancer-registry country-years, and an additional surveillance country-year. Expansions of the GBD cause of death hierarchy resulted in 18 additional causes estimated for GBD 2017. Newly available data led to subnational estimates for five additional countries-Ethiopia, Iran, New Zealand, Norway, and Russia. Deaths assigned International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes for non-specific, implausible, or intermediate causes of death were reassigned to underlying causes by redistribution algorithms that were incorporated into uncertainty estimation. We used statistical modelling tools developed for GBD, including the Cause of Death Ensemble model (CODEm), to generate cause fractions and cause-specific death rates for each location, year, age, and sex. Instead of using UN estimates as in previous versions, GBD 2017 independently estimated population size and fertility rate for all locations. Years of life lost (YLLs) were then calculated as the sum of each death multiplied by the standard life expectancy at each age. All rates reported here are age-standardised

Intonational settings as markers of discourse units in telephone conversations

A study of business telephone calls provides quantitative evidence suggesting “intonational settings”: Certain attributes of intonation are sustained throughout discourse units in the calls (openings, business transactions, preclosures, and final closures), and differentiate one unit from another, as if phonologically significant aspects of intonation are realized within a space controlled by discourse-related parameters. Two types of parameter emerge, one controlling the midpoint of the F0 contour in frequency space, the other controlling the way it fluctuates. </jats:p