Most of the research on spoken dialogue systems so far has focused either on higher levels of dialogue or on speech understanding. In contrast, the lowlevel interactional aspects of conversation such as turn-taking have been essentially ignored, leading builders of practical systems to resort to simple pause detection-based methods to handle turn-taking. In a preliminary study based on the Let’...

To accomplish a smooth transition in conversation from one speaker to the next, a tight coordination of interaction between speakers is required. Recent studies of adult conversation suggest that this close timing of interaction may well be a universal feature of conversation. In the present paper, we set out to assess the development of this close timing of turns in infancy in vocal exchanges ...

The quality of daily spontaneous conversations is importance towards both our well-being as well the development interactive social agents. Prior research directly studying has operationalized it in narrow terms, associating greater to less small talk. Other works taking a broader perspective interaction experience have indirectly studied through one several overlapping constructs such rapport ...

Project COGITO aims at an agent-based interface for B-to-C applications that is not merely re-active to some user request, but pro-active and capable of engaging in a goal-directed conversation with the user, e.g., by taking the initiative to recommend new products. The approach combines content-based filtering, where user profiles are generated based on content features extracted from document...

In conversation, people avert their gaze from one another to achieve a number of conversational functions, including turn-taking, regulating intimacy, and indicating that cognitive effort is being put into planning an utterance. In this work, we enable virtual agents to effectively use gaze aversions to achieve these same functions in conversations with people. We extend existing social science...

spiritual identity is conceptualized as defining and identification of oneself based on spirituality and spiritual experiences. this study, in a framework of a causal model, investigated the mediating role of spiritual identity between family communication orientations and loneliness aspects. participants, four hundred undergraduate shiraz university students (268 girls and 132 boys) were parti...

effort revolutionized spoken language technology and made independent speaker and continuous, real-time speech recognition systems a reality on large, powerful systems. Subsequent advancements in speech recognition technology by IBM, Dragon Systems, Learnout and Hauspie, Entropics, and other companies, resulted in the capabilities of independent speaker and continuous speech, real-time recognit...

We are building a broadcast news video archive where topics of interest can be retrieved and tracked easily. This paper introduces a structuring method applied to the accumulated news videos. First they are segmented into topic units and then threaded according to their mutual relations. A user interface for topic thread-based news video retrieval is also introduced. Since the topic thread stru...

We need to analyse a large number of e-mails sent by the citizens to the customer services department of a governmental organisation based in Sweden. To carry out this analysis we clustered a large number of e-mails with the aim of automatic e-mail answering. One issue that came up was whether we should use the whole e-mail including the thread or just the original query for the clustering. In ...

Adjacency pair recognition, a necessary component of discussion thread reconstruction, is the task of recognizing reply-to relations between pairs of discussion turns. Previously, dialogue act classification and metadata-based features have been shown useful in adjacency pair recognition. However, for certain forums such as Wikipedia discussions, metadata is not available, and existing dialogue...