In this paper, the effect of ocean-land mixed propagation path on the lightning performance of grounding rods is investigated. This effect is focused on two problems. The first is extracting exact equivalent circuit of grounding rods in the presence of oceans. The equivalent circuit can be used in transient analysis of power systems in the neighboring oceans. In the second one, this effect on t...

A common convention in graphical user interfaces is to indicate a “wait state”, for example while a program is preparing a response, through a changed cursor state or a progress bar. What should the analogue be in a spoken conversational system? To address this question, we set up an experiment in which a human information provider (IP) was given their information only in a delayed and incremen...

Head pose and gesture offer several conversational grounding cues and are used extensively in face-to-face interaction among people. To accurately recognize visual feedback, humans often use contextual knowledge from previous and current events to anticipate when feedback is most likely to occur. In this paper we describe how contextual information can be used to predict visual feedback and imp...

In this article we consider the ways in which visual information is used as a conversational resource in the accomplishment of collaborative physical tasks. We focus on the role of visual information in maintaining task awareness and in achieving mutual understanding in conversation. We first describe the theoretical framework we use to analyze the role of visual information in physical collabo...

The main task of a service robot with a voice-enabled communication interface is to engage a user in dialogue providing an access to the services it is designed for. In managing such interaction, inferring the user goal (intention) from the request for a service at each dialogue turn is the key issue. In service robot deployment conditions speech recognition limitations with noisy speech input ...

In human-computer interaction, as in conversation, neither partner is omniscient. To facilitate repairs when problems arise, an interface needs to enable both user and system to coordinate their separate knowledge states. We present a conversational feedback model for human-computer interaction, based on a collaborative theory of human communication (Clark & Schaefer, 1989) and use this model t...

Due to the large variability in the speech signal, the speech recognition process constitutes the major source of errors in most spoken dialogue systems. A spoken dialogue system can never know for certain what the user is saying, it can only make hypotheses. As a result of this uncertainty, two types of errors can be made: over-generation of hypotheses, which leads to misunderstanding, and und...

Research on interactive communication increasingly focuses on the role of eye gaze as an important signal in interaction management, reference and grounding (see [1] for an overview). Interlocutors may use eye gaze as a means to take, hold or give the floor in conversation (turn management), to refer to objects or persons in the conversational space (gaze cueing) or to give and elicit feedback ...

Can two different descriptions refer to the same event or action? Recognising that dissimilar strings are equivalent in meaning for some purpose is something that humans do rather well, but it is a task at which machines often fail. In the Natural Language Processing Group at Microsoft Research, we are attempting to address this challenge at sentence scale by generating semantically equivalent ...