The linguistic-communicative paradigm offers some interesting perspectives in a context where the perception of patient needs is considered a critical step in high-quality care. This study describes healthcare organizations as linguistic communities based on the conceptual framework of Habermas' communicative action theory. Four communicative models are present in healthcare settings: objectify...

Dialogue systems need to be able to understand a user’s communicative intentions, reason with those intentions, form their own communicative intentions, and realize those intentions with actual language to be uttered to the user. Oftentimes in dialogue systems, however, what these communicative intentions actually correspond to is never clearly defined. We propose a descriptive model of dialogu...

In order for a model of rational agency to be used for multi-agent social interaction, the model must be extended to account for communicative behaviors that are ineecient for one agent, but which increase the eeciency of the interaction of two agents in a dialogue. In this paper, we argue that naturally occurring communicative behaviors are often directed at the resource limits of the other ag...

Pointing movements can serve instrumental goals (‘pointing to press a button’) or communicative goals (‘pointing to indicate to someone which button to press’). Previous work has shown that communicative pointing follows different trajectories, and has different end points than instrumental pointing movements, depending on the addressee’s spatial location. This suggests that motor control proce...

The ability to effectively communicate thoughts, feelings, and identity to others is an important aspect of occupational performance. The symptoms of Parkinson's disease can impair a person's ability to verbally and non-verbally communicate with others. In order to better understand issues of communication functioning for this population, research tools to describe expressive and communicative ...

Communicative behaviors are a very important aspect of human behavior, and deserve special attention when simulating groups and crowds of virtual pedestrians. Previous approaches have tended to focus on generating believable gestures for individual characters and talker-listener behaviors for static groups. In this paper, we consider the problem of creating rich and varied conversational behavi...

The father-son dyad might be the most socially significant male-male relationship in the life course, yet its negative qualities have been the sole focus in most research on the relationship. One communicative aspect that has received little scholarly attention is the expression of affection between fathers and sons, despite the strong correlation of affectionate communication with positive inv...

Our aim is to create an affective Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA); that is an ECA able to display communicative and emotional signals. Nonverbal communication is done through certain facial expressions, gesture shapes, gaze direction, etc. But it can also carry a qualitative aspect through behavior expressivity: how a facial expression, a gesture is executed. In this paper we describe some ...

Pragmatic competence is as an essential aspect of communicative competence. Does environment have an effect on developing pragmatic competence? Do levels of pragmatic competence differ between English as a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL) students? Most studies have shown greater pragmatic awareness among ESL students than EFL students, indicating that the target la...

Knowledge management (KM) plays an increasingly important role in software development. We find that a missed aspect of software development methods is their possibility to play a role as knowledge enabler. Knowledge enablers are organizational mechanisms for intentionally and consistently developing knowledge in organizations. Drawing on KMtheories we discuss what roles methods can play as kno...