Social interaction is a fundamental aspect of human life and is also a key research area in psychology and cognitive science. Social psychologists have been researching the dimensions of social interaction for decades and found out that a variety of social communicative cues strongly determine social behavior and interaction outcomes. Many of these cues are consciously produced, in the form of ...

The paper presents a method for identifying problems of usersystem interaction. Based on a consolidated set of 24 principles of cooperative spoken human-machine dialogue, the paper then proposes and illustrates a general typology of non-cooperative system dialogue behaviour for use in spoken language dialogue analysis and evaluation.

This paper describes a bootstrapping methodology for semi– automatic semantic annotation of a “mini–corpus” that is conventionally annotated manually to train an initial parser used in natural language understanding (NLU) systems. We propose to cast the problem of semantic annotation as a classification problem: each word is assigned a unique set of semantic tag(s) and/or label(s) from the univ...

XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) is designed to represent hierarchical structures; in this case, it shows the structure of the prosodic components of spoken language. The XML-based transcription system proposed here allows the input of 1) the phonetic parameters of F0, intensity and duration of each syllable, their relative variation and standard values to facilitate discrimination and compari...

In this paper, we describe active and semi-supervised learning methods for reducing the labeling effort for spoken language understanding. In a goal-oriented call routing system, understanding the intent of the user can be framed as a classification problem. State of the art statistical classification systems are trained using a large number of human-labeled utterances, preparation of which is ...

We report on our explorations of laughter in multiparty spoken interaction. Laughter is universally observed in human interaction. It is multimodal in nature: a stereotyped exhalation from the mouth in conjunction with rhythmic head and body movement. Predominantly occurring in company rather than solo, it is believed to aid social bonding. Spoken interaction is widely studied through corpus an...

To date, little research on pragmatic transfer has considered a multilingual situation where there is an interaction among three different languages spoken by one person. Of interest was whether pragmatic transfer of refusals among three languages spoken by the same person occurs from L1 and L2 to L3, L1 to L2 and then to L3 or from L1 and L1 (if there are more than one L1) to L2. This study ai...

We present a discriminative model for detecting disfluencies in spoken language transcripts. Structurally, our model is a semiMarkov conditional random field with features targeting characteristics unique to speech repairs. This gives a significant performance improvement over standard chain-structured CRFs that have been employed in past work. We then incorporate prosodic features over silence...

Despite their basic attractiveness as an interaction paradigm for controlling intelligent environments, the design of spoken dialog systems for this purpose raises some usability challenges that require careful attention. This paper examines closely the communication failures that can occur in the control of one particular type of intelligent environment: a smart home system that provides contr...

Unlike written documents, spoken documents are difficult to display on the screen; it is also difficult for users to browse these documents during retrieval. It has been proposed recently to use interactive multi-modal dialogues to help the user navigate through a spoken document archive to retrieve the desired documents. This interaction is based on a topic hierarchy constructed by the key ter...