This paper describes a novel method by which a dialogue agent can learn to choose an optimal dialogue strategy. While it is widely agreed that dialogue strategies should be formulated in terms of communicative intentions, there has been little work on automatically optimizing an agent's choices when there are multiple ways to realize a communicative intention. Our method is based on a combinati...

Several subjects with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) show communicative and pragmatic problems. In this study, we suggested that mentalistic comprehension tasks would help us to find a deteriorated pragmatic profile among the population with SLI. To achieve this goal, a group of participants with conventional SLI (n=11) was compared to a group of SLI with more pragmatic problems (n=9) and t...

Domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) and great apes from the genus Pan were tested on a series of object choice tasks. In each task, the location of hidden food was indicated for subjects by some kind of communicative, behavioral, or physical cue. On the basis of differences in the ecologies of these 2 genera, as well as on previous research, the authors hypothesized that dogs should be especially ...

During the course of an ethnographic study of a bilingual special education classroom, three profile types of students emerged, ranging from students with severe language learning disabilities to students with normal abilities. The study points out the inadequacy of a medical model view of student abilities and disabilities--a view that underestimates the communicative and academic competence o...

Discussions of interaction in second language performance assessment have generally been loosely psychological in orientation, forming part of attempts to model the nature of communicative ability within the individual But in investigating the validity of performance assessments involving interactions between individuals (for example between candidate and interlocutor m speaking assessments), t...

By the performance of language acts, participants in an organisation initiate action and report about results. An unambiguous interpretation of these language acts is important for the modelling of business communication. In the actual realisation of business conversations the communicative intention of the speaker often differs from the grammatical meaning of the sentence. This paper focuses o...

This paper describes an improvement in the performance of Transfer-Driven Machine Translation ( T D M T ) by the use of extralinguistic information. In evaluating what constitutes natural speech, particular attention was paid to word usage that depended on the extra-linguistic information from the context, situation, environment and so on. We discuss what types of extra-linguistic information a...

This article is a comparison of the Natural Approach and Communicative Language Teaching. Using the Richards and Rodgers’ model for conceptualizing approaches and methods described in Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching, 1986, Cambridge University Press, I compare and contrast these two approaches carefully at the level of approach, design and procedure. At the level of approach, I look...