Film scripts provide a means of examining generalized western social perceptions of accepted human behavior. In particular, we focus on how dialogue in films describes gender, identifying linguistic and structural differences in speech for men and women and in same and different-gendered pairs. Using the Cornell Movie-Dialogs Corpus (DanescuNiculescu-Mizil et al., 2012a), we identify significan...

Collaborators generally coordinate their activities through communication, during which they readily negotiate a shared lexicon for activity-related objects. This social-pragmatic activity both recruits and affects cognitive and social-cognitive processes ranging from selective attention to perspective taking. We ask whether negotiating reference also facilitates category learning or might priv...

Group-based privileges are supported and reproduced in part by control of discourse about identity and structural inequality. In the case of social class, this discourse is largely absent. This article explores the ways in which the lack of explicit and sanctioned discourse on social class affirms and reproduces class privileges. Qualitative thematic content analysis was used to analyze the fin...

Automatically detecting human social intentions from spoken conversation is an important task for dialogue understanding. Since the social intentions of the speaker may differ from what is perceived by the hearer, systems that analyze human conversations need to be able to extract both the perceived and the intended social meaning. We investigate this difference between intention and perception...

This paper investigates the conditions under which social signals (facial expressions, postures, gazes, etc.), especially non-verbal multimodal user appraisal, can help to accelerate the learning capacity of a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent in the dialogue management context. For this purpose a potential-based shaping reward method is used jointly with the Kalman Temporal Differences (KTD) f...

This paper describes a conversational system POLLy (POliteness in Language Learning) which uses a common planning representation to generate actions to be performed by embodied agents in a virtual environment, and to generate spoken utterances for dialogues about the steps involved in completing the task. In order to generate socially appropriate dialogue, Brown and Levinson’s theory of politen...

Heterosexism contributes to an unsafe campus climate for lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) college students. Intergroup dialogue courses about sexual orientation seek to build awareness, cross-group relationships, and commitment to social action to address anti-LGB prejudice and discrimination. Although dialogue courses are growing in popularity, few courses address sexual orientation. To advanc...