Dialogues can bring people together across social divides to develop mutual understanding, generate empathy, and challenge oppression. Yet, all too often, these conversations derail merely reinforce rather than the they are designed bridge. We piloted a brief small group program aimed at fostering dialogue about racism other forms of oppression with 100 undergraduates. A thematic analysis resul...

Public sector organisations have different communication needs from private sector organisations. For example, they quite often have programmes aimed at behaviour changes, challenging their ability to choose the strategy which best suit their purpose. Dialogue is often considered a strategic tool which can lead to organisational gains such as motivation, learning, development, collaboration, et...

Current practice in Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) is that therapists ask patients about their anxiety level by means of the Subjective Unit of Discomfort (SUD) scale. With an aim of developing a home-based VRET system, this measurement ideally should be done using speech technology. In a VRET system for social phobia with scripted avatar-patient dialogues, the timing of asking patient...

Repairs –the various ways in which people edit and reformulate conversational turns– are a characteristic feature of natural dialogue. However, relatively little is known about their overall frequency or distribution in conversation. We present a systematic, quantitative study of patterns of repair in two corpora: ‘ordinary’ dialogues from the British National Corpus (BNC) and task-oriented dia...

In this demonstrator we present the Furhat robot head. Furhat is a highly human-like robot head in terms of dynamics, thanks to its use of back-projected facial animation. Furhat also takes advantage of a complex and advanced dialogue toolkits designed to facilitate rich and fluent multimodal multiparty human-machine situated and spoken dialogue. The demonstrator will present a social dialogue ...

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