In many of the world's languages grammatical aspect is used to indicate how events unfold over time. In English, activities that are ongoing can be distinguished from those that are completed using the morphological marker -ing. Using naturalistic observations of two children in their third year of life, we quantify the availability and reliability of the imperfective form in the communicative ...

Linguistic communication builds on prelinguistic communicative gestures, but the ontogenetic origins and complexities of these prelinguistic gestures are not well known. The current study tested whether 8-month-olds, who do not yet point communicatively, use instrumental actions for communicative purposes. In two experiments, infants reached for objects when another person was present and when ...

This paper describes the DAMSL annotation scheme for communicative acts in dialog The scheme has three layers Forward Communicative Functions Backward Communicative Functions and Utterance Features Each layer allows multiple communicative functions of an utterance to be labeled The Forward Communicative Functions consist of a taxonomy in a similar style as the actions of traditional speech act ...

We implemented the connectionist model of social-pragmatic word learning (Caza & Knott, 2012) to test the hypothesis that reduced joint attention between infant and mother would increase the difference in acquisition between nouns and verbs as observed in Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The ratio of objects to actions in the observed event stream was manipulated to create an original noun-ver...

We introduce the particular functionality of the Complaint Engine suite, the integrated complaint management component for mediating consumer disputes. We formulate the problem of epistemic categorization: whether a given complaint submitted by an upset customer is an adequate representation of company’s product, service and attitude towards customers. To do that, a sequence of communicative ac...

Based on a field study of cooperative design in a distributed company, this paper identifies and defines the embodied actions of the designers that enabled a cooperative design process. These actions are considered as classes of cognitive practices that are simultaneously available to the actor and others in a shared physical workspace. The public availability of these actions to the perception...

We propose a mechanism to learn communicative action structure to analyze adversarial reasoning patterns in customer complaints. An efficient way to assist customers and companies is to reuse previous experience with similar agents. A formal representation of customer complaints and a machine learning technique for handling scenarios of interaction between conflicting human agents are proposed....

In this paper we present the use of Statecharts for modeling the communicative behavior of a team involved in cooperative software design. Design episodes were previously represented using diagrams called Dynamics of Interaction Diagrams from which we have now drawn up a cooperative design activity model. The modeling activity itself led to the recognition of a number of underlying properties, ...

This paper describes a media-independent knowledge representation scheme, or content language, for describing the content of communicative goals and actions. The language is used within an intelligent system for automatically generating integrated text and information graphics presentations about complex, quantitative information. The language is designed to satisfy four requirements: to repres...

When engaged in dialogues, people perform communicative actions to pursue specific communicative goals. Speech acts recognition attracted computational linguistics since long time and could impact considerably a huge variety of application domains. We study the task of automatic labeling dialogues with the proper dialogue acts, relying on empirical methods and simply exploiting lexical semantic...