Conversation is an essential component of social behaviour, one of the primary means by which humans express emotions, moods, attitudes and personality. Thus a key technical capability for dialogue applications, such as interactive narrative systems (INS), human robot interaction (HRI) and spoken dialogue systems (SDS), is the ability to support natural conversational interaction. However, syst...

This paper describes a narrative-oriented approach to the design and analysis of a computational system and a set of activities for mathematical learning. Our central contention is that programming can offer a key to resolving the tension between the different representational structures of narrative and mathematical formalism. In the course of describing our approach, we make a distinction bet...

The Hidden Information State (HIS) Dialogue System is the first trainable and scalable implementation of a spoken dialog system based on the PartiallyObservable Markov-Decision-Process (POMDP) model of dialogue. The system responds to n-best output from the speech recogniser, maintains multiple concurrent dialogue state hypotheses, and provides a visual display showing how competing hypotheses ...

This paper reflects on the role of philosophy in school environment, paying special attention to promise intergenerational dialogue carried forward by programmes associated with Lipman’s Philosophy for Children (P4C) curriculum and its current transformation into (PwC). There are two basic ideas that constitute guiding thread my reflections. Firstly, philosophical interventions kind challenge a...

When people engage in conversation, they adapt their speaking style of their conversational partner in a number of ways. They have been shown to adopt their interlocutor's way of describing objects and to align their accent, their syntax, their pitch range, and their speaking rate to their partner's ‐‐ as well as their gestures. They also adapt their turn‐taking style and use of cue phrases to ...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to analyze the effects of culture on the creative and stylistic features children employ when producing narratives based on wordless picture books. METHOD Participants included 60 first- and second-grade African American, Latino American, and Caucasian children. A subset of narratives based on wordless picture books collected as part of a larger study was...

We tested whether overhearers made use of the relationship between specific (e.g. really, oh) and generic (e.g. uh huh, mhm) backchannels and speakers’ talk in online dialogue comprehension. In Experiment 1 we found that words that followed specific backchannels were recognized more slowly than words that followed either generic backchannels or pauses. In Experiment 2 we found that the type of ...