There has been much controversy recently as to whether the rules of interaction discovered by conversation analysts are amenable to use by computers (Gilbert 1990; Hirst 1991; Luff, Gilbert, and Frohlich 1990). Button (1990) has argued that the rules of conversation are of a different ontological category than the rules used by computers, and that this means computers cannot be programmed to en...

The paper considers a development of the conversation scheme version proposed by A.Clematis and V.Giannuzzi in Microprocessing and Microprogramming (Vol.32, No.1-5, 1991) [5] and Computer Languages (Vol.18, No.3, 1993) [6]. The authors discussed the methodology of using conversations within a conventional concurrent language (Ada), which makes the conversation scheme practical. In our paper we ...

Building a persona-based conversation agent is challenging owing to the lack of large amounts of speaker-specific conversation data for model training. This paper addresses the problem by proposing a multi-task learning approach to training neural conversation models that leverages both conversation data across speakers and other types of data pertaining to the speaker and speaker roles to be m...

Previous research has found that the musical intervals found in speech are associated with various emotions. Intervals can be classified by their level of consonance or dissonance-how pleasant or unpleasant the combined tones sound to the ear. Exploratory investigations have indicated that in an agreeable conversation, the pitches of the last word in an utterance and the first word of a convers...

We describe Cobot, a mixed initiative socio-semantic conversational search and recommendation system for finding health information. With Cobot, users can start a real time conversation about their health concerns. Cobot then connects relevant users together in the conversation also providing contextual recommendations relevant to the conversation. Conventional search engines and content portal...

We present a theory of conversation comprehension in which a l ine of the conversation is "understood" by relat ing it to one of seven possible "points". We define these points, and present examples where it seems plausible that the fai lure to "get the point" would indeed constitute a fai lure to understand the conversation. We argue that the recognition of such points must proceed in both a t...

We propose a speech-based conversation environment called Voice Cafe for facilitating dynamic knowledge interaction. Dynamic knowledge interaction is a key concept for creative interaction. Conversation is one of important interactions that facilitates dynamic knowledge interaction. In Voice Cafe, users can talk with conversational agents being equipped with automatic speech recognition (ASR) a...

teacher questions are claimed to be constitutive of classroom interaction because of their crucial role both in the construction of knowledge and the organization of classroom proceedings (dalton puffer, 2007). most of previous research on teachers’ questions mainly focused on identifying and discovering different question types believed to be helpful in creating the opportunities for learners’...

Role-plays provide students with the opportunity to demonstrate how to use English in real life situations and make them focus more on communication than on grammar. Oral presentations like conversations are a great way for students to practice their English skills. Therefore, this paper makes an attempt to investigate whether teaching conversation through role play affects the students’ speaki...