Search results for "conversation"
showing 10 items of 285 documents
Estudi comparatiu de l’atenuació pragmàtica en la llengua catalana: converses col·loquials prototípiques-converses col·loquials perifèriques
2017
A comparative study on pragmatic mitigation in a corpus of colloquial conversations in Catalan has been conducted in this work. Its aim objective is to study mitigation in a contrastive way, that is to say, to examine the usage contrast of this pragmatic strategy amongst prototypical colloquial conversations and peripheral colloquial conversations. For this purpose, it was believed appropriate to previously explain conversational genre and colloquial register, that is to say, colloquial conversation and its characteristics. In order to conduct thus study, one’s own corpus has been complied (recorded and transcribed) consisting of five colloquial conversations: two prototypical ones and thre…
‘Disability Gain’ and the Limits of Representing Alternative Beauty
2018
In this conversation, Ann Fox, Matthias Krings and Ulf Vierke debate the concept of ‘disability gain’ and the limits of representing alternative beauty. The concept demands that we regard disability inclusion as a resource gain, instead of a resource drain. While this approach complicates and questions the societal definition and devaluation of ‘disability,’ it also raises a number of debatable issues. For example, what happens when ‘disabled’ bodies are commodified in an attempt to represent so-called alternative beauty? The conversation shows that, while the stakes for the fashion-beauty industry in extending aesthetic norms, pluralizing beauty and mainstreaming diversity are high, it man…
To correct or not correct the erroneous utterances of children: teacher‐initiated organisation of repair in the L2 pre‐primary education classroom
2010
ABSTRACT The research reported on a qualitative study of feedback given in one Finnish pre‐primary education group which integrated English into the programme as a first foreign language. The study was based on the authentic video‐recorded observations of actual pre‐primary teaching sessions (N = 11 lessons). The findings suggested that the reactions of the teachers to child errors depended on the types of errors made by children. The study discussed the tension present in feedback giving when balancing between the aim of maintaining the early interest of children in language learning and the purpose of paying attention to correct ways of using the target language. The data were analysed by…
A parental voice: parents as equal and dependent – rhetoric about parents, teachers, and their conversations
2009
This study analyses texts from the National Parents’ Committee for Primary and Lower Secondary Education in Norway and addresses how parents describe their own role, the teachers’ role, and their conversations. The theoretical perspective employed is Koselleck’s conceptual theory. The findings show that, despite having formal legal rights, parents must constantly legitimize these rights in school. Parents are expected to assume a passive role, while the teachers’ role is held to be active. Furthermore, the diversity among parents is not discussed. Parents moreover resign their own involvement in their children’s education in spite of the fact that teachers and parents may have different per…
On the positive aspects of customers: Customer-initiated support and affective crossover in employee-customer dyads
2011
This study examines psychological resources for service employees and their customers, which enhance the service experiences of both parties during service conversations. We investigate whether customer behaviour (customer-initiated support) positively impacts on employees' affect. We also examine the crossover of employees' affect on customers' affect. State positive affect (PA) was assessed in 82 employees of car dealerships and 421 customers on 2 occasions (before and after the conversation). Multi-level analyses showed the hypothesized positive impact of customer behaviour on employees' PA and in turn of employees' PA on customers' PA. Results are integrated in an overall process model …
InspirationWall
2015
Collaborative idea generation leverages social interactions and knowledge sharing to spark diverse associations and produce creative ideas. Information exploration systems expand the current context by suggesting novel but related concepts. In this paper we introduce InspirationWall, an unobtrusive display that leverages speech recognition and information exploration to enhance an ongoing idea generation session with automatically retrieved concepts that relate to the conversation. We evaluated the system in six idea generation sessions of 20 minutes with small groups of two people. Preliminary results suggest that InspirationWall contrasts the decay of idea productivity over time and can t…
Phase Coherence in Conceptual Spaces for Conversational Agents
2010
This chapter attempts to enhance the traditional chatbots with associative/intuitive capabilities. According to these considerations, it tries to create a conversational agent model that takes into consideration, aside from the traditional rule - based dialogue mechanism, also some sort of intuitive reasoning ability. The aim is in attempting to overcome the rigid pattern - matching rules, proposing a "phase coherence" paradigm into a semantic space. With this locution the chapter intend that the vectors representing the elements of the dialogue are coherent with the context. The chapter trust that this intuitive - associative capability can be obtained using the LSA methodology. The repres…
A Topic Recognition System for Real World Human-Robot Conversations
2013
One of the main features of social robots is the ability to communicate and interact with people as partners in a natural way. However, achieving a good verbal interaction is a hard task due to the errors on speech recognition systems, and due to the understanting the natural language itself. This paper tries to overcome such kind of problems by presenting a system that enables social robots to get involved in conversation by recognizing its topic. Through the use of classical text mining approach, the presented system allows social robots to understand topics of conversation between human partners, enabling the customization of behaviours in their accordance. The system has been evaluated …
A Modular Framework for Versatile Conversational Agent Building
2011
This paper illustrates a web-based infrastructure of an architecture for conversational agents equipped with a modular knowledge base. This solution has the advantage to allow the building of specific modules that deal with particular features of a conversation (ranging from its topic to the manner of reasoning of the chatbot). This enhances the agent interaction capabilities. The approach simplifies the chatbot knowledge base design process: extending, generalizing or even restricting the chatbot knowledge base in order to suit it to manage specific dialoguing tasks as much as possible.
Investigating Proactive Search Support in Conversations
2018
Conversations among people involve solving disputes, building common ground, and reinforce mutual beliefs and assumptions. Conversations often require external information that can support these human activities. In this paper, we study how a spoken conversation can be supported by a proactive search agent that listens to the conversation, detects entities mentioned in the conversation, and proactively retrieves and presents information related to the conversation. A total of 24 participants (12 pairs) were involved in informal conversations, using either the proactive search agent or a control condition that did not support conversational analysis or proactive information retrieval. Data c…