Lawrence Cunningham’s Contracts in the Real World offers a good starting place for necessary conversations about how contract law should be taught, and, more generally, for when and how cases—in summary form or in longer excerpts—are useful in teaching the law. This Article tries to offer some reasons for thinking that their prevalence may reflect important truths about contract law in particul...

intro for the special issue

When involved in face-to-face conversations, people move their heads in typical ways. The pattern of head gestures and their function in conversation has been studied in various disciplines. Many factors are involved in determining the exact patterns that occur in conversation. These can be explained by considering some of the basic properties of face-to-face interactions. The fact that convers...

This article intends to identify the use and typify the functions of tag questions (TQs) in Persian everyday conversations and dialogic interaction.  The analyses were made based on two data sources:  A documentary film titled Commander in which the participants are engaged in free interactions, and an audio-recorded instrument named CALLFRIEND which consists of Iranian native...

We describe an approach to improving the naturalness of a social dialogue system, Talkie, by adding disfluencies and other content-independent enhancements to synthesized conversations. We investigated whether listeners perceive conversations with these improvements as natural (i.e., human-like) as human-human conversations. We also assessed their ability to correctly identify these conversatio...