Long branch attraction is a problem that afflicts phylogenetic methods and a procedure to detect a data set suffering from this problem is the long branch extraction method[1]. This method has been well cited and used by many authors for their analysis but no strong validation has been performed as to its accuracy. We performed such an analysis by an extensive search of the branch length search...

The present paper attempts to present a review of the experimental findings dealing with the posture and position of a communicator relative to his attitude and status to his addressee. More studies are available which exhibit the detailed functional relationships of posture and position variables to communicator attitudes than to communicator-addressee relative status. Distance, eye contact, b...

This article discusses strategies to express intimacy with and exaltation of the addressee ― affective stances morphologically incompatible in the Japanese honorific system, wherein addressees are marked as either psychologically distant and exalted, honored, shown respect or intimate and not exalted. To resolve this dilemma, speakers commonly embed soliloquy in dialogic discourse, a strategy d...

In this paper, we study the problem of addressee and response selection in multi-party conversations. Understanding multi-party conversations is challenging because of complex speaker interactions: multiple speakers exchange messages with each other, playing different roles (sender, addressee, observer), and these roles vary across turns. To tackle this challenge, we propose the Speaker Interac...

In this paper the authors present a notion of “user-friendly” translation and describe a method for achieving it within a pragmatics-based approach to machine translation. The approach relies on modeling the beliefs of the participants in the translation process: the source language speaker and addressee, the translator and the target language addressee. Translation choices may vary according t...

Is communication the primary functional role of gesticulation? We conducted a study in which participants narrated to a presumed computer system, a presumed addressee in another room (via web cam), or an addressee in the same room, who could either see them or not. Participants produced significantly fewer gestures when they thought to be talking to a computer system. Our results show that peop...