Conventional synthetic voices can synthesise neutral read aloud speech well. But, to make synthetic speech more suitable for a wider range of applications, the voices need to express more than just the word identity. We need to develop voices that can partake in a conversation and express, e.g. agreement, disagreement, hesitation, in a natural and believable manner. In speech synthesis there ar...

Learning/training is an important application domain for intelligent agents technologies supporting believable dialogues and realistic virtual environments. In this paper, we first review, in section 2, some of the current applications and research in technology-enhanced learning. In section 3 we discuss the impact of conversational agents on the design of more effective individual and group/co...

We propose a conversational agent that can act as a virtual representative of a web site interacting with visitors using natural languages. The agent consists of three main components: dialogue act categorization, structured pattern matching, and knowledge construction and representation. Dialogue acts are identified by automata which accept sequences of keywords defined for each of the dialogu...

This study focuses on conversational implicatures in humorous utterances. In pragmatics, implicature analysis is used to reveal the additional meaning or implied of speech conveyed by speaker. An can occur because a violation principle conversation. Conversational (especially) only appears context certain utterances and has an meaning. utterance conversation imply pragmatic function implicitly ...

Conversation is often considered as the most problematic area in the field of formal linguistics, primarily because of its dynamic emerging nature. The degree of complexity is also high in comparison to traditional sentential analysis. The challenge for developing a formal account for conversational analysis is bipartite: Since the smallest structural unit at the level of conversational analysi...

Stance-taking, the expression of opinions or attitudes, informs the process of negotiation, argumentation, and decisionmaking. While receiving significant attention in text materials in work on the related areas of subjectivity and sentiment analysis, the expression of stance in speech remains less explored. Prior analysis of the acoustics of stance-expression in conversational speech has ident...

Virtual humans and other virtual agents are becoming more common in our everyday lives. Whether in the form of phone-based personal assistants or automated customer service systems, these technologies have begun to touch more of our activities. This research aims to understand how this technology affects the way we interact with our computer systems. Using a chat bot, I studied the way a conver...

This study compares the handling of agreement and disagreement by speakers from two different cultural groups: London’s British West African community and its mainstream British white community. Using data from elicited conversations, we consider naturally-occurring agreements and disagreements at three different linguistic levels. Firstly, based on Pomerantz’s (1984) observations of turn-takin...

This study investigates the presence of dynamical patterns of interpersonal coordination in extended deceptive conversations across multimodal channels of behavior. Using a novel "devil's advocate" paradigm, we experimentally elicited deception and truth across topics in which conversational partners either agreed or disagreed, and where one partner was surreptitiously asked to argue an opinion...

This paper concerns non-verbal communication, and describes especially the use of eye-gaze to signal turn-taking and feedback in conversational settings. Eye-gaze supports smooth interaction by providing signals that the interlocutors interpret with respect to such conversational functions as taking turns and giving feedback. New possibilities to study the effect of eye-gaze on the interlocutor...