Prosody in tonal languages such as Mandarin provides a fascinating test on the universal character and attributes of prosody in natural language. Prosodic variation is a key element in marking intention, cognitive states, and topic development, and answers to how these communicative goals are accomplished in Mandarin provide enlightening discoveries on the universality of prosodic forces and sh...

What kinds of social organizations are used as resources when people communicate through talk in interaction? It is this question that conversation analysis attempts to answer. Conversation analysis (CA) studies the methods participants orient to when they organize social action through talk. It investigates rules and practices from an interactional perspective and studies them by examining rec...

Spoken Dialogue Systems are man-machine interfaces which use speech as the medium of interaction. In recent years, dialogue optimization using reinforcement learning has evolved to be a state of the art technique. The primary focus of research in the dialogue domain is to learn some optimal policy with regard to the task description (reward function) and the user simulation being employed. Howe...

The goal of the paper is to describe both challenges and solutions for constructing user context graphs in large social networks like Twitter. We first describe data collection process and present straightforward user sampling technique to reduce data size without any loss in performance. Next, we define user political orientation classification task and present 2 types of user context graphs s...

This present research investigated the relationship between personal impressions and the acoustic nonverbal communication conveyed by employees being interviewed. First, we investigated the extent to which different conversation topics addressed during the interview induced changes in the interviewees' acoustic parameters. Next, we attempted to predict the observed and self-assessed attitudes a...

The definition of usability has evolved over time. Some of the proposed definitions have been general, and apply to all types of interactive systems. Others were tremendously influenced by the experience of those who proposed the definitions and the domain in which they practiced usability. The definitions, in general, seem to agree that the targeted users, the complexity of the task, the type ...

A major problem with Implicit Association Tests (IATs) is that they require bipolar attributes (e.g., good-bad). Thus, IAT effects for an attribute category can be interpreted only relative to an opposite category. Problems arise if there is no clear opposite category; in this case, a neutral category can be used, although it induces systematic error variance and thus reduces validity. The pres...

Performance benchmarks are proposed to assist undergraduate psychology programs in defining their missions and goals as well as documenting their effectiveness. Experienced academic program reviewers compared their experiences to formulate a developmental framework of attributes of undergraduate programs focusing on activity in 8 domains: curriculum, assessment issues, student learning outcomes...

Goal-orientated Conversational Agents are a specific family of conversational agents that are designed to converse with humans through the use of natural language dialogue to achieve a specific task. Traditionally, they utilise pattern matching algorithms to capture the values of specific attributes through their values through dialogue interaction with a user. This is achieved through the use ...