PURPOSE This study examined the extent to which teacher responsivity education affected preschoolers' language and literacy development over an academic year. Additional aims were to determine whether children's initial language abilities and teachers' use of responsivity strategies were associated with language outcomes, in particular. METHOD In this randomized controlled trial, preschool ce...

The recently published Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology does not spend a single word on computer-aided language learning (CALL). Indeed, present-day CALL systems hardly employ Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Reasons for this state of affairs are not hard to find. First of all, current language teaching methods tend to emphasize oral language skills, espe...

This research examined whether children with autism could be trained to improve their conversational skills and whether this led to changes in standard tests of theory of mind (ToM). Three high-functioning children with autism participated in a multiple baseline across participants design. The children were taught how to initiate a conversation, take turns during conversation, listen attentivel...

Conversational AI systems are becoming famous in day to day lives. In this paper, we are trying to address the following key question: To identify whether design, as well as development efforts for search oriented conversational AI are successful or not. It is tricky to de€ne ’success’ in the case of conversational AI and equally tricky part is to use appropriate metrics for the evaluation of c...

Social interactions among preschool children were classified into four groups according to language ability: normally developing English, specific language impairment (SLI), speech impairment (SI), and English as a second language (ESL). The children were observed in naturalistic classroom interactions on three occasions. Conversational turns were coded according to initiations and responses, a...

This paper describes work in progress on DEAL, a spoken dialogue system under development at KTH. It is intended as a platform for exploring the challenges and potential benefits of combining elements from computer games, dialogue systems and language learning.

Web-based sales assistance systems are a valuable means to guide online customers in the decision-making and product selection process. Conversational recommenders simulate the behavior of an experienced sales expert, which is a knowledge-intensive task and requires personalized user interaction according to the customers’ needs and skills. In this paper, we present the ADVISOR SUITE framework ...

In this paper, the authors reflect on their experiences teaching ISD using collaborative teamwork within student groups in consecutive subjects in autumn and spring semesters 2003. The authors took a mentoring role within the class structure. The lectures were informal and of a conversational nature wherein the different student groups openly discussed their progress and difficulties with their...

In this study, we investigated the combined effect of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and an intensive Conversational therapy treatment on discourse skills in 12 persons with chronic aphasia. Six short video clips depicting everyday life contexts were prepared. Three videoclips were used to elicit spontaneous conversation during treatment. The remaining three were presented only ...