This article builds a micro founded model of cultural conflict. In this model intrinsically motivated cultural leaders supply and interpret culture. Leaders have an incentive to amplify disagreement about cultural values. This leads to a clash of perspectives between cultures. The population benefits from the supply of culture but suffers if leaders amplify disagreement. The article discusses c...

This journey started in 1950 at Antioch College when I wrote a required Life Aims paper to make a comparative study of East and West in philosophy, religion, art, literature, and the social sciences. In 1977 I went to India on a grant for clinical psychoanalytic research to assess the psychological effects of Westernization on Indians, to ascertain differences in configurations of the self from...

We introduce multidimensional feature structures as a generalization of standard slot/filler representations commonly employed in spoken language dialogue systems. Nodes in multidimensional feature structures contain an dimensional vector of values instead of one single filler element. The additional elements serve to represent, among other information, confidence measures of speech recognizers...

In this paper we present an approach for clustering dialogue items, both semantic and discursive. We use Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to cluster the different dialogue items according to a correlation-based distance. After building a set of groups that make up a partition of the semantic or discursive space, we train a stochastic Language Model (LM) for each group. We use these LM to dynamica...

In this study, we describe the use of back-channelling patterns extracted from a dialogue corpus as a mean to characterising text-based dialogue systems. Our goal was to provide system users with the feeling that they are interacting with distinct individuals rather than artificially created characters. An analysis of the corpus revealed that substantial difference exists among speakers regardi...

Dialogue act classification is an important step in understanding students’ utterances within tutorial dialogue systems. Machinelearned models of dialogue act classification hold great promise, and among these, unsupervised dialogue act classifiers have the great benefit of eliminating the human dialogue act annotation effort required to label corpora. In contrast to traditional evaluation appr...