We provide two case studies in the application of ideas drawn from conversation analysis to the design of technologies that enhance the experience of human conversation. We first present a case study of the design of an electronic guidebook, focusing on how conversation analytic principles played a role in the design process. We then discuss how the guidebook project has inspired our continuing...

Discourse analysis is increasingly becoming a methodology of preference amongst qualitative researchers. There is a danger, however, of it being viewed as a bounded and uncontested domain of research practice. As discourse analysis is inextricably linked with theoretical issues, it is a dynamic practice that is constantly in a process of revision. In this paper I reflect on some of the conceptu...

Multi-dimensional (MD) analysis is a methodological approach that applies multivariate statistical techniques (especially factor analysis and cluster analysis) to the investigation of register variation in a language. The approach was originally developed to analyze the full range of spoken and written registers in a language. Early studies focused on English register variation (Biber 1985, 198...

Though not especially media-rich, mailing lists remain in use and retain popularity for their builtin technological controls and their capability to “reply” to a message (“continuing a thread”). The motivation for extracting knowledge fragments from the unstructured text of mailing lists is compelling, though successes doing so may be considered only partial because it requires mental processin...

We investigate the combination of several sources of information for the purpose of subjectivity recognition and polarity classification in meetings. We focus on features from two modalities, transcribed words and acoustics, and we compare the performance of three different textual representations: words, characters, and phonemes. Our experiments show that character-level features outperform wo...

The proposed system is designed to support the dynamic formation of human relationships between strangers in networked virtual space. This system attempts to locate the most suitable virtual space for the content of their conversation. The system analyzes the conversation by using morphological analysis and provides candidate virtual spaces related to the conversation topic. Users can change th...

This paper presents a general argument for a relevance-based approach to the problem of connectivity in conversation. First, the potential relevance of conversation for pragmatic theory is discussed, as examples in pragmatic theory generally consist of small conversations. A typical problem for conversation analysis and pragmatic analysis is the description of uses of pragmatic connectives. The...

With the goal of designing conversational agents that can join and manage conversations with multiple participants, in this paper, we conduct an experiment to collect multiparty conversations with a virtual agent, and recognize head direction as each participant’s focus of attention. Then, we analyze how gaze and mutual gaze affect floor management and conversation dominance; we assumed that th...

Conversational practices do not occur at a single unit of analysis. To understand the interplay between social positioning, information sharing, and rhetorical strategy in language, various granularities are necessary. In this work we present a machine learning model for multi-party chat which predicts conversation structure across differing units of analysis. First, we mark sentence-level beha...

BACKGROUND Nearly one in three Americans are financially burdened by their medical expenses. To mitigate financial distress, experts recommend routine physician-patient cost conversations. However, the content and incidence of these conversations are unclear, and rigorous definitions are lacking. We sought to develop a novel set of cost conversation definitions, and determine the impact of defi...