Background: Healthcare delivery is largely accomplished in and through conversations between people, and healthcare quality and effectiveness depend enormously upon the communication practices employed within these conversations. An important body of evidence about these practices has been generated by conversation analysis and related discourse analytic approaches, but there has been very litt...

Chatbots are a rapidly expanding application of dialogue systems with companies switching to bot services for customer support, and new applications for users interested in casual conversation. One style of casual conversation is argument; many people love nothing more than a good argument. Moreover, there are a number of existing corpora of argumentative dialogues, annotated for agreement and ...

Clarification requests (CRs) in conversation ensure and maintain mutual understanding and thus play a crucial role in robust dialogue interaction. In this paper, we describe a corpus study of CRs in task-oriented dialogue and compare our findings to those reported in two prior studies. We find that CR behavior in task-oriented dialogue differs significantly from that in everyday conversation in...

This paper introduces a novel method for capturing conversation scenes and editing of the obtained videos. This system aims to acquire high-quality videos and to utilize them for multimedia that provides conversation functions. First, a video capturing system composed of “environmental camera module” and “contents capturing camera modules” is introduced. Next, a novel computational video editin...

BACKGROUND Healthcare delivery is largely accomplished in and through conversations between people, and healthcare quality and effectiveness depend enormously upon the communication practices employed within these conversations. An important body of evidence about these practices has been generated by conversation analysis and related discourse analytic approaches, but there has been very littl...

This paper introduces a query refinement method applied to queries asked by users during a meeting or a conversation. Current approaches suffer from poor quality to achieve this goal, but we argue that their performance could be improved by focusing on the local context of the conversation. The proposed technique first represents the local context by extracting keywords from the transcript of t...

We describe data selection strategies for an English-French Skype conversation translation task without in-domain training data. Selection methods based on language modeling and text formality criterion are evaluated. Our main finding is that translating conversation transcripts turned out to not be as challenging as we expected: while translation quality is of course not perfect, a straightfor...

The authors present a study of prosodic turn-taking indicators. The aim was to investigate whether some of the prosodic cues increase in quality or quantity if the optical feedback channel in the verbal conversation is missing. For the study we built up an experimental setup in which conversational partners held a conversation once with and once without an optical feedback channel. A detailed t...

Imagine sitting in your work place lounge having coffee with some colleagues. Now imagine that you and your colleagues are still in the same room, but are separated by a large sheet of glass that does not interfere with your ability to carry on a clear, two-way conversation. Finally, imagine that you have split the room into two parts and moved one part 50 miles down the road, without impairing...