Sequence-to-sequence neural network models for generation of conversational responses tend to generate safe, commonplace responses (e.g., I don’t know) regardless of the input. We suggest that the traditional objective function, i.e., the likelihood of output (response) given input (message) is unsuited to response generation tasks. Instead we propose using Maximum Mutual Information (MMI) as t...

This study focuses on conversational implicatures in humorous utterances. In pragmatics, implicature analysis is used to reveal the additional meaning or implied of speech conveyed by speaker. An can occur because a violation principle conversation. Conversational (especially) only appears context certain utterances and has an meaning. utterance conversation imply pragmatic function implicitly ...

Rapport has been identified as an important function of human interaction, but to our knowledge no model exists of building and maintaining rapport between humans and conversational agents over the long-term that operates at the level of the dyad. In this paper we leverage existing literature and a corpus of peer tutoring data to develop a framework able to explain how humans in dyadic interact...

In a speech community, people utilize their communicative competence which they have acquired from their society as part of their distinctive sociolinguistic identity. They negotiate and share meanings, because they have commonsense knowledge about the world, and have universal practical reasoning. Their commonsense knowledge is embodied in their language. Thus, not only does social life depend...

in a speech community, people utilize their communicative competence which they have acquired from their society as part of their distinctive sociolinguistic identity. they negotiate and share meanings, because they have commonsense knowledge about the world, and have universal practical reasoning. their commonsense knowledge is embodied in their language. thus, not only does social life depend...

Service-oriented architecture concepts and Web Services specifications allow for an infinite binding between the service requestor and the service provider. This open-ended form of interaction constrains the service provider from changing service contracts, policies and endpoints. Other distributed technologies and protocols such as Jini and DHCP provide for the use of a lease to more easily ma...