H. P. Grice pioneered the study of conversational logic and put forward classic theory Conversational Implicature Cooperative Principle. Completely adhering to Principle or deliberately violating it will lead Implicature. In The Great Gatsby, main characters, such as Gatsby Daisy, tactically violate abide by relevant maxims in their communication, thus generating expressing true feelings. At sa...

Impaired social communication and social reciprocity are the primary phenotypic distinctions between autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and other developmental disorders. We investigate quantitative conversational cues in child-psychologist interactions using acoustic-prosodic, turn-taking, and language features. Results indicate the conversational quality degraded for children with higher ASD sev...

Academic advisors assist students in academic, professional, social and personal matters. Successful advising increases student retention, improves graduation rates and helps students meet educational goals. This work presents an advising system that assists advisors in multiple tasks using natural language. This system features a conversational agent as the user interface, an academic advising...

To improve the recognition accuracy for spontaneous conversational speech, we collected a corpus to study how spontaneous conversational speech differs from read style speech. The corpus consists of two parts: 1) spontaneous conversational speech and 2) read speech with the same word transcriptions as the conversational speech. In word and phone recognition experiments, it was confirmed that, f...

We present a spoken dialog-based framework for the computerassisted language learning (CALL) of conversational English. In particular, we leveraged the open-source HALEF dialog framework to develop a job interview conversational application. We then used crowdsourcing to collect multiple interactions with the system from non-native English speakers. We analyzed human-rated scores of the recorde...

When developing a conversational agent, there is often an urgent need to have a prototype available in order to test the application with real users. A Wizard of Oz is a possibility, but sometimes the agent should be simply deployed in the environment where it will be used. Here, the agent should be able to capture as many interactions as possible and to understand how people react to failure. ...

Context plays a critical role in the understanding of language, especially conversational speech. However, few approaches exist to utilize the external contextual knowledge which is readily available to practical speech translation systems deployed in the field. In this work, we propose a novel framework to integrate context in the language models used for conversational speech translation. The...

PURPOSE Over the past 50 years, language sample analysis (LSA) has evolved from a powerful research tool that is used to document children's linguistic development into a powerful clinical tool that is used to identify and describe the language skills of children with language impairment. The The Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT; J. F. Miller & A. Iglesias, 2008) Software Proje...

Pedagogic conversational agents can be effective in promoting the acquisition of language and intercultural skills, both as virtual coaches and virtual conversational partners. This paper gives an overview of a framework for utilizing conversational agents to promote acquisition of intercultural communication skills. Adaptation plays an important and increasing role, in creating courses that ar...

Willingness to communicate (WTC) in a second language (L2) is believed to have a direct and sustained influence on learners’ actual usage frequency of the targeted language. To help overcome the lack of suitable environments to increase L2 learners’ WTC, our approach is to implement a WTC model based conversational agent. In this paper, we focus on the dialogue management aspects of our approac...