This paper surveys data management techniques used in Application Servers. It begins with an overview of Application Server architectures and the way they have evolved from earlier transaction processing systems. It then presents a ta-xonomy of clustered services that differ in the way they manage data in memory and on disk. The treatment of conversational state is discussed in depth. Finally, ...

Caregiver speech is not a static collection of utterances, but occurs in conversational exchanges, in which caregiver and child dynamically influence each other's speech. We investigate (a) whether children and caregivers modulate the prosody of their speech as a function of their interlocutor's speech, and (b) the influence of the initiator of the conversation on durational characteristics of ...

Assisting Conversational Agents are Embodied Conversational Agents dedicated to the Function of Assistance for applications and services to the general public, especially on the Internet. We have developed a web-based framework to experiment with assisting agents regarding the key issue of believability, and where good Natural Language Understanding is a primary concern. Now, we are confronted ...

Previously, it has been shown that using clear speech short-term spectra improves the intelligibility of conversational speech. In this paper, a speech transformation method is used to map the spectral features of conversational speech to resemble clear speech. A joint-density Gaussian mixture model is used as the mapping function. The transformation is studied in both the formant frequency and...

The crucial role of affective factors like anxiety, inhibition, motivation and self-esteem have long been of interest in the field of language learning due to their enormous association with the cognitive processes involved in performance in a second or foreign language. This study aimed at investigating the relationship between Iranian EFL learners’ self-esteem and conversational dominance in ...

An adaptive speech recognizer is a key function in the design of a robust spoken dialogue system. Our research focuses on the human tendency of prosodic alignment to one’s conversational partners. A spoken dialogue system might be able to exploit this human tendency to implicitly influence people to manage their speech at the prosodic level in order to accommodate its recognition capabilities. ...

We evaluate the limitations of the bag-of-words assumption for topic identification of conversational discourse by examining whether topic-dependent word occurrence statistics are also position-independent. We demonstrate where the assumption is violated in conversational speech corpora and show how the relevance of words to the classification task decreases over the length of the document. We ...