This paper reports on experiments in measuring the general level of conversational interactivity in COMPS problemsolving dialogues. COMPS is a web-delivered computermediated problem solving environment for student collaborative exploratory learning. The primary mode of interaction is typed dialogue. We anticipate that the computer will provide a status display to aid the instructor, who is effe...

The popularity of image sharing on social media and the engagement it creates between users reflect the important role that visual context plays in everyday conversations. We present a novel task, ImageGrounded Conversations (IGC), in which natural-sounding conversations are generated about a shared image. To benchmark progress, we introduce a new multiplereference dataset of crowd-sourced, eve...

Deep neural networks have shown recent promise in many language-related tasks such as the modelling of conversations. We extend RNN-based sequence to sequence models to capture the long-range discourse across many turns of conversation. We perform a sensitivity analysis on how much additional context affects performance, and provide quantitative and qualitative evidence that these models can ca...

WHAT IS KNOWN ON THE SUBJECT?: Caregivers of adolescents with ADHD experience major difficulties as care providers and are in need of guidance and support. Adolescents with ADHD may develop oppositional and criminal behaviour. More than 50 % have the symptoms in adulthood, and up to one-fourth with severe emotional or antisocial difficulties. There is a lack of evidence of caregivers' supportin...

As services become more loosely coupled and increasingly autonomous, heterogeneous distributed services should be able to discover and converse with each other dynamically, with or without human intervention. Current paradigms of service interaction require service developers to hardcode their logic to adhere strictly to pre-defined conversation policies. We propose here a mechanism for a Conve...

Conversation analysts have sometimes been taken to task for apparently choosing not to deal with the "context" of the conversational activities they examine (Cicourel, 1981). In Talking Culture Moerman (1988) describes a blend of ethnography and conversation analysis, and suggests that ethnography describes contextual data extrinsic to interaction while conversation analysis provides non-contex...

BACKGROUND Those attempting to implement changes in health care settings often find that intervention efforts do not progress as expected. Unexpected outcomes are often attributed to variation and/or error in implementation processes. We argue that some unanticipated variation in intervention outcomes arises because unexpected conversations emerge during intervention attempts. The purpose of th...

BACKGROUND & AIMS A recent systematic review of conversation training for communication partners of people with aphasia has shown that it is effective, and improves participation in conversation for people with chronic aphasia. Other research suggests that people with aphasia are better able to learn communication strategies in an environment which closely mirrors that of expected use, and that...

aim: considering the fundamental role of parents' function and family dynamics including the importance role of family communication pattern on preventing early-onset substance use in children, the present study aimed to determine the correlation between family communication pattern and mothers' preventive behavioral intention regarding preventing early-onset substance use in children...

In conversation, when speech is followed by a backchannel, evidence of continued engagement by one’s dialogue partner, that speech displays a combination of cues that appear to signal to one’s interlocutor that a backchannel is appropriate. We term these cues backchannel-preceding cues (BPC)s, and examine the Columbia Games Corpus for evidence of entrainment on such cues. Entrainment, the pheno...