McGowan argues that everyday verbal bigotry makes a key contribution to the harms of discriminatory inequality, via mechanism she calls sneaky norm enactment. Part her account involves showing characteristic conversational interaction facilitates enactment is in fact generic one, which obtains wide range activities, namely, property having conventions appropriateness. I argue will be better-abl...

Chatbots are emerging as a promising platform for accessing and delivering healthcare services. The evidence is in the growing number of publicly available chatbots aiming at taking an active role provision prevention, diagnosis, treatment This article takes closer look how these address design aspects relevant to service provision, emphasizing Human-AI interaction transparency AI automation de...

We study the problem of imposing conversational goals/keywords on open-domain agents, where agent is required to lead conversation a target keyword smoothly and fast. Solving this enables application agents in many real-world scenarios, e.g., recommendation psychotherapy. The dominant paradigm for tackling 1) train next-turn classifier, 2) keyword-augmented response retrieval model. However, ex...

PURPOSE The present study examined the extent of genetic and environmental influences on individual differences in children's conversational language use. METHOD Behavioral genetic analyses focused on conversational measures and 2 standardized tests from 380 twins (M = 7.13 years) during the 2nd year of the Western Reserve Reading Project (S. A. Petrill, K. Deater-Deckard, L. A. Thompson, L. ...

People engage in small talk and conversational storytelling to provide information in engaging ways and to serve interpersonal goals such as building rapport and credibility. Embodied conversational interface agents, that represent the computer in its interaction with human users by way of a graphical humanoid body on a screen, can also profitably engage in these behaviors. We describe the ongo...

Embodied conversational agents are virtual characters that engage users in conversation with appropriate speech, gesture, and facial expression. The high cost of developing embodied conversational agents has led to a recent increase in open source agent platforms. In this paper, we present XNAgent, an open source platform for embodied conversational agents based on the XNA Framework. By leverag...

We detail the design, development and evaluation of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) software which encourages rapid conversational interaction. The system uses Natural Language Generation (NLG) technology to automatically generate conversational utterances from a domain knowledge base modelled from content suggested by a small AAC user group. Findings from this work are present...