Rhetorical moves that construct humanoid robots as social agents disclose tensions at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS) and social robotics. The discourse of robotics often constructs robots that are like us (and therefore unlike dumb artefacts). In the discourse of STS, descriptions of how people assimilate robots into their activities are presented directly or indirectl...

This paper proposes the integration into a coherent whole of current insights from two linguistic approaches, cognitive and systemic functional linguistics, with the aim of trying to develop an analytical tool that will allow users a deeper understanding when examining advertising discourse, which is characterized by relying on a multimodal universe since two are the semiotic modes used: langua...

Two salient properties of user behavior make Help Desk a unique speech application different from the more general transactional kind: (a) majority of users have only vague ideas about their problem, and (b) these users are likely to contextswitch (change discourse topic) during the course of a dialog. We describe a conversational Help Desk natural language call routing application and show how...

The purpose of this investigation was to specify the kinds of miscomprehensions produced by individuals listening to synthetic speech. In the first study, 80 written summaries of synthesized speech passages were analyzed to determine the types of miscomprehensions or linguistic departures made by listeners when attempting to recall the spoken texts. These departures were classified according to...

I argue that a synthetic explanatory strategy is an important step forward for developing a more comprehensive understanding of human language, in particular natural language performance. By considering some statistical definitions of the notion of synergy, I argue that we should expect very low-level units of measure, such as voice or body movement, to predict higher-level units of measure, su...

Purpose Voice assistant (VA) technology is one of the fastest-growing artificial intelligence applications at present. However, burgeoning scholarship argues that there are ethical challenges relating to this new technology, not least related privacy, which affects technology’s acceptance. Given media impacts public opinion and acceptance VA no studies on coverage VA, study focuses coverage. In...