Outside of Western contexts, natural-conversation-based research on intergenerational communication is relatively rare. To help redress this imbalance, this paper explores the conversational styles of first-encounter talks between five pairs of college students and older adults in Taiwan, and infers the interactional norms that underlie them. It is found that younger Taiwanese adults tend to ex...

Conversational analysis was used to ascertain that two student project meetings conducted using CuSeeme chat and video, contained sufficient discussion to progress the projects. The findings were that conversational "rules" were followed and chains of discussion occurred. These findings support the literature reviewed that shows remote groups need effective communication channels for planned an...

This paper introduces a general methodology for the development and study of conversational systems. Closer coupling of linguistic and psycholinguistic theories about dialogue with the development of dialogue systems allows each to inform the other more fully. Three activities support our goals. We develop theories through the empirical investigation of dialogue in conversational settings. We u...

In our work with conversational recommender systems we have derived two dialogue strategies called interview and delivery. We explore the symmetry between preferential interview and traditional clarification questions, and arrive at basic interview and delivery strategies suitable for conversational recommender system implementations. The strategies are based on a corpus analysis of recommendat...

Visual data exploration poses challenges for ’InfoVis Novices’. A ’conversational interface’ which would enable users to generate and interact with visualizations through natural language and gestures, while maintaining a history of the data exploration, has the potential to ameliorate many of these challenges. We performed an exploratory, observational study designed to examine the role of suc...

This paper describes ongoing work related to the analysis of spoken utterance transcripts and estimating the speaker’s attitude towards the whole dialogue on the basis of their opinions expressed by utterances. Using the standard technology used in sentiment analysis, we report promising results which can be linked to the conversational participants’ self-evaluation of their experience of the i...