The current study investigated whether twins and singletons differed in their expressive language development at school age. Comparisons focused on language samples and formalized vocabulary assessments gathered from 28 twins and 28 singletons within the Western Reserve Reading Project; the two groups were matched on age, gender, and parent education level. The children’s language samples, take...

We have recently seen the emergence of several publicly available Natural Language Understanding (NLU) toolkits, which map user utterances to structured, but more abstract, Dialogue Act (DA) or Intent specifications, while making this process accessible lay developer. In paper, we present first wide coverage evaluation and comparison some most popular NLU services, on a large, multi-domain (21 ...

In conversational language, references to people (especially to the conversation participants, e.g., I, you, and we) are an essential part of many expressed meanings. In most conversational settings, however, many such expressions have numerous potential meanings, are frequently vague, and are highly dependent on social and situational context. This is a significant challenge to conversational ...

This article falls within the realm of dialogue between a human and an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA). We claim that a specific agent conversational language is needed for such interactions, based on the essential role of emotion in human communication. In order to define this language, we propose a library of Multimodal Conversation Acts is proposed, based in particular on speech acts and...

We detail the design, development and evaluation of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) software which encourages rapid conversational interaction. The system uses Natural Language Generation (NLG) technology to automatically generate conversational utterances from a domain knowledge base modelled from content suggested by a small AAC user group. Findings from this work are present...