This study analyses four women’s speech from Kobe who were interviewed by the same researcher in 1989 and 2000. We focused on highly indexical pragmatic youth language features (discourse markers end-rising intonation) to understand about societal pressures that young women Japan face when transitioning into adulthood. The analysis reveals a complex picture; some use them more as time goes by, ...

Spoken natural language often contains ambiguities that must be addressed by a spoken dialogue system. In this work, we present the internal semantic representation and resolution strategy of a dialogue system designed to understand ambiguous input. These mechanisms are domain independent; task-specific knowledge is represented in parameterizable data structures. Speech input is processed throu...

The pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic aspects of language use vary across different situations, languages, and cultures. The separation of these two facets of language use can help to map out the socio-cultural norms and conventions as well as the linguistic forms and strategies that underlie the pragmatic performance of different language speakers in a variety of target language use situatio...

Human-machine dialogue aims at providing natural dialogue in natural language, i.e., allowing the user to speak using his own language (natural language), following a structure of moves and exchanges that is similar to human dialogue structure (natural dialogue). Related research works feed on linguistics, which analyses language markers, and pragmatics, which analyses language use in context. ...

We present an approach to dialogue management and interpretation that evaluates and selects amongst candidate dialogue moves based on features at multiple levels. Multiple interpretation methods can be combined, multiple speech recognition and parsing hypotheses tested, and multiple candidate dialogue moves considered to choose the highest scoring hypothesis overall. We integrate hypotheses gen...

This research focuses on the problem of correlation between discursive modality and illocutionary force - with substantiating variations in as a pragmatic basis for scale-paradigm deontic modality, influencing binding international instruments. Guided by criterion explicitness implicitness markers, well their localization performative or propositional part, paper categorizes five classes commis...