Evaluation of complex, collaborative dialogue systems is a difficult task. Traditionally, developers have relied upon subjective feedback from the user, and parametrisation over observable metrics. However, both models place some reliance on the notion of a task; that is, the system is helping to user achieve some clearly defined goal, such as book a flight or complete a banking transaction. It...

Social relationships are central to human life and are underpinned by the social interactions that constitute them. Both the behavioral sequences and the quality of these interactions vary significantly from individual to individual and conversation to conversation. This makes it difficult to understand the mechanisms that cause individual differences in social behavior and how such differences...

Grice (Syntax and semantics: Speech acts, 1975, pp. 41-58, Vol. 3) proposed that conversation is guided by a spirit of cooperation that involves adherence to several conversational maxims. Three types of maxims were explored in the current study: 1) Quality, to be truthful; 2) Relation, to say only what is relevant to a conversation; and 3) Quantity, to provide as much information as required. ...

With increasing popularity and ever emerging business needs there was an immense focus to improve the Internet world and to provide guarantee for service delivery. Simplest example for this case is VoIP where two subscribers make a voice call through MPLS based backbone. The end subscribers should have similar quality as that of POTS. Subscribers will expect a real time conversation with limite...

Well-organized conversation can improve people's ability to comprehend and retain information. As part of a long-term effort to adapt Quality Improvement techniques for communication, we developed an explicit-criteria method to assess usage of three organizing behaviors (OBs): 'opening behaviors' to establish goals; 'structuring behaviors' to guide patients through conversation; and 'emphasizin...

This paper reports on the use of both qualitative modelling (i.e. Journey Making) and quantitative system dynamics simulation modelling for a strategy making process in a UK police force. The main focus of the work is on the tension between the supply of resources (i.e. police officers) and the demands placed on those officers. The strategic conversation that took place was facilitated by 2 mod...

Conventional topic models are ineffective for topic extraction from microblog messages since the lack of structure and context among the posts renders poor message-level word co-occurrence patterns. In this work, we organize microblog posts as conversation trees based on reposting and replying relations, which enrich context information to alleviate data sparseness. Our model generates words ac...

Deep neural networks have shown recent promise in many language-related tasks such as the modeling of conversations. We extend RNN-based sequence to sequence models to capture the long range discourse across many turns of conversation. We perform a sensitivity analysis on how much additional context affects performance, and provide quantitative and qualitative evidence that these models are abl...

In order to investigate the potential impact of interactivity on the perceived quality of future telecommuncation services, it is necessary to define a simple but efficient metric for this conversation parameter. To this end, recently it has been proposed to use an obvious analogy to statistical thermodynamics and define interactivity as system temperature of a Markov chain describing the conve...