Mental illness is one of the most pressing public health issues of our time. While counseling and psychotherapy can be effective treatments, our knowledge about how to conduct successful counseling conversations has been limited due to lack of large-scale data with labeled outcomes of the conversations. In this paper, we present a large-scale, quantitative study on the discourse of text-message...

Using Artificial Companions for tasks requiring long-term interaction like language learning or coaching can be approached by creating local computational models for particular interaction structures, and models reflecting changes in interaction over time. An Artificial Conversational Companion (ACC) that helps to practice conversation in a foreign language is expected to play the role of a lan...

In order to understand and model the non-verbal communicative conduct of humans, it seems fruitful to combine qualitative methods (Conversation Analysis) and quantitative techniques (motion capturing). A tool for data visualization and annotation is important as it constitutes a central interface between different research approaches and methodologies. We have developed the pre-annotation tool ...

Doctor-patient conversation is considered a contributing factor to antibiotic overprescription. Some language practices have been identified as parent pressuring doctors for prescribing; other practices are considered as likely to engender parent resistance to non-antibiotic treatment recommendations. In social science studies, approaches such as conversation analysis have been applied to ident...

Recent studies on referring expressions usually resort to quantitative methods such as recurrence analysis to measure the degree of coordination among eye gaze patterns of interlocutors. Such methods are successful in providing an overall picture of the degree of coupling among partners and how the degree of coupling varies in response to contextual factors such as the degree of shared beliefs ...

Despite the body of research on textbook evaluation from the discourse analysis perspective, cohesive devices have rarely been analyzed in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) textbooks. The acquisition and use of cohesive devices is inherent to naturalistic communication, including business interactions. Hence, L2 learners of business English should be exposed to these devices through cohesion-...

The blink rate (BR) during rest, conversation, and reading was assessed in 50 patients with blepharospasm (BS) and in 150 healthy subjects. BR at rest and during conversation was higher in patients with BS. Moreover, 76% of patients had BR higher at rest than during conversation, whereas in 74% of controls, BR was higher during conversation than at rest. The sensitivity and specificity of two p...

Conversation therapies employing video for feedback and to facilitate outcome measurement are increasingly used with people with post-stroke aphasia and their conversation partners; however the evidence base for change in everyday interaction remains limited. We investigated the effect of Better Conversations with Aphasia (BCA), an intervention that is freely available online at https://extend....