With advances in robotics, robots can give advice and help using natural language. The field of HRI, however, has not yet developed a communication strategy for giving advice effectively. Drawing on literature in politeness and informal speech, we propose options for a robot’s help-giving speech— using hedges or discourse markers, both of which can mitigate the commanding tone implied in direct...

This study explores whether discourse markers play a role in L2 listening comprehension and whether software programs make a difference in L2 listening comprehension. Two groups of approximately 25 freshman students listened to two versions of three different talks with and without higher order discourse markers. The talks were delivered by a native speaker, a non-native speaker and by a softwa...

This paper examines an understudied area of pragmatic research, namely, the sequencing of Discourse Markers (DMs). Looking only at the sequencing of Contrastive Discourse Markers (CDMs), thereby excluding both Elaborative and Inferential Discourse Markers, it is shown that only “but” may occur as the first with all of the other CDMs, e.g., “But, on the other hand...,” with “yet” occurring first...

Despite the growing knowledge with regard to the immunomodulatory properties of host defense peptides, their impact on macrophage differentiation and on its associated microbicidal functions is still poorly understood. Here, we demonstrated that the P17, a new cationic antimicrobial peptide from ant venom, induces an alternative phenotype of human monocyte-derived macrophages (h-MDMs). This phe...

Although successful attempts to inhibit HIV-1 replication in T cells using RNAi have been reported, the effect of HIV-specific RNAi on macrophages is not well known. Macrophages are key targets for anti-HIV-1 therapy because they are able to survive long after the initial infection with HIV and can spread the virus to T cells. In this study, we identified a putative RNAi target of HIV, consisti...

The host genetic landscape surrounding integrated HIV-1 has an impact on the fate of the provirus. Studies analysing HIV-1 integration sites in macrophages are scarce. We studied HIV-1 integration site patterns in monocyte-derived macrophages (MDMs) and activated CD4(+) T cells derived from seven antiretroviral therapy (ART)-treated HIV-1-infected individuals whose cells were infected ex vivo w...

Discourse particles and discourse markers (henceforth DMs) are intriguing objects of study, as they promise the researcher ready access to the very fabric of talk-inprogress. They can occur as lexical equivalents or complements of more elusive gestural or intonational cues that subtly guide and modulate the participants’ understanding, or they can saliently signal relations between utterances o...

This paper applies machine learning techniques to acquiring aspects of the meaning of discourse markers. Three subtasks of acquiring the meaning of a discourse marker are considered: learning its polarity, veridicality, and type (i.e. causal, temporal or additive). Accuracy of over 90% is achieved for all three tasks, well above the baselines.

Usually, by Multi-Word Expressions (MWEs) we mean expressions whose structure and meaning cannot be derived from their component words as they occur independently. In this talk I will discuss a different kind of multi-word expressions that behave as discourse relation markers (DRMs), yet do not seem to belong to well-defined syntactic classes. The apparent open-endedness of these expressions is...

e) after 350ms wait you should produce back-channel feedback. Our model for English is the same except for some parameters: pitch level (clause a) 26th-percentile, recovery time (clause d) 800ms, and delay (clause e) 700ms. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n Back-channel feedback, also called "listener responses'~ is, to a first approximation, those responses produced by one participant which do not int...