The novelist as voice hearer

The Novelist as Cultural Hero of Moder- nity? On Richard Rorty’s New Pragma- tism

Let us begin with a generalisation: Richard Rorty’s approach to literature is consistently – to use his own opposition – ‘solidarity-related’; what he calls the ‘other side’, literary self-creation, remains programmatically and intentionally undiscussed. One gets the impression that literature, and the novel in particular, is being burdened with an (‘unbearable’) heaviness of responsibility. Do...

Enhancing Referential Success by Tracking Hearer Gaze

The ability to monitor the communicative success of its utterances and, if necessary, provide feedback and repair is useful for a dialog system. We show that in situated communication, eyetracking can be used to reliably and efficiently monitor the hearer’s reference resolution process. An interactive system that draws on hearer gaze to provide positive or negative feedback after referring to o...

Speaker-hearer beliefs for dis ourse planning

Incrementality, Speaker-Hearer Switching and the Disambiguation Challenge

Taking so-called split utterances as our point of departure, we argue that a new perspective on the major challenge of disambiguation becomes available, given a framework in which both parsing and generation incrementally involve the same mechanisms for constructing trees reflecting interpretation (Dynamic Syntax: (Cann et al., 2005; Kempson et al., 2001)). With all dependencies, syntactic, sem...

Voice as Sound : Using Non - verbal Voice Input for

We describe the use of non-verbal features in voice for direct control of interactive applications. Traditional speech recognition interfaces are based on an indirect, conversational model. First the user gives a direction and then the system performs certain operation. Our goal is to achieve more direct, immediate interaction like using a button or joystick by using lower-level features of voi...