Background Recent years have witnessed a constant increase in the number of people with chronic conditions requiring ongoing medical support their everyday lives. However, global health systems are not adequately equipped for this extraordinarily time-consuming and cost-intensive development. Here, conversational agents (CAs) can offer easily scalable ubiquitous support. Moreover, different asp...

Many online human activities leave digital traces that are recorded in natural-language format. The exploitation of this unprecedented resource under a computational framework can bring a phase transition in our understanding of human social behavior and shape the future of social media systems. This thesis describes a computational approach to an intriguing aspect of conversational behavior, l...

This study investigated how native language background interacts with speaking style adaptations in determining levels of speech intelligibility. The aim was to explore whether native and high proficiency non-native listeners benefit similarly from native and non-native clear speech adjustments. The sentence-in-noise perception results revealed that fluent non-native listeners gained a large cl...

This study investigated how exposure to changing or reaffirmation opinions in robot conversations influences the impressions of observers and their trust media. Even though provided conversational contents include same amount information, order, positive/negative attitudes, discussion styles change perceived impressions. We conducted a web survey using video stimuli, where two robots discussed ...

Twitter—a microblogging service that enables users to post messages (“tweets”) of up to 140 characters—supports a variety of communicative practices; participants use Twitter to converse with individuals, groups, and the public at large, so when conversations emerge, they are often experienced by broader audiences than just the interlocutors. This paper examines the practice of retweeting as a ...

Children with developmental disabilities often converse less frequently than their developmentally matched peers. This low conversational participation can cause problems for the children's future language and discourse development. The purpose of this experimental study was to test the hypothesis that adult topic-continuing wh-questions would elicit topic continuations in children with relativ...

A growing number of research projects in academia and industry have recently started to develop lifelike agents as a new metaphor for highly personalised human-machine communication. A strong argument in favour of using such characters in the interface is the fact that they make humancomputer interaction more enjoyable and allow for communication styles common in human-human dialogue. In this p...

Modelling varying speaking style remains a challenge to state of the art speech recognition and synthesis systems. Vowel and consonant reduction have been identified as correlative to speaking style variation, but still lack a common measurement. The reduction phenomena are often observed without consideration of coarticulation and assimilation effects, and as a result of speaking rate variabil...