BACKGROUND GP receptionists are the first point of contact with the NHS for most patients and have an important role in facilitating access to healthcare services. There is evidence that they are often perceived as impersonal, insensitive, or officious. AIM To analyse the communicative styles of GP receptionists when dealing with patients. DESIGN OF STUDY Ethnographically situated discourse...

Abstract This paper investigates the effectiveness of identification task on retention situation-bound utterances (SBUs) in Chinese as a foreign language (CFL). The participants were Italian CFL learners with different lengths learning experience, divided into an experimental and control group. target SBUs selected by means discourse completion questionnaire previously submitted to native speak...

Current crowdsourcing platforms provide little support for worker feedback. Workers are sometimes invited to post free text describing their experience and preferences in completing tasks. They can also use forums such as Turker Nation to exchange preferences on tasks and requesters. In fact, crowdsourcing platforms rely heavily on observing workers and inferring their preferences implicitly. I...

Reinforcement learning-based spoken dialogue systems aim to compute an optimal strategy for dialogue management from interactions with users. They compare their different management strategies on the basis of a numerical reward function. Reward inference consists of learning a reward function from dialogues scored by users. A major issue for reward inference algorithms is that important paramet...

This paper assumes a user-oriented point of view in examining the performability of a dependable omputing system. The investigated performability measure is the e e tive time that a task, with an assigned work requirement, takes to be exe uted by the system. Assuming that the system hanges its performan e hara teristi s randomly in time, the sto hasti model representing the task ompletion time ...

This paper describes our system for Shallow Discourse Parsing the CoNLL 2015 Shared Task. We regard this as a classification task and build a cascaded system based on Maximum Entropy to identify the discourse connective, the spans of two arguments and the sense of the discourse connective. We trained the cascaded models with a variety of features such as lexical and syntactic features. We also ...