Assisting Conversational Agents are Embodied Conversational Agents dedicated to the Function of Assistance for applications and services to the general public, especially on the Internet. We have developed a web-based framework to experiment with assisting agents regarding the key issue of believability, and where good Natural Language Understanding is a primary concern. Now, we are confronted ...

This paper introduces Paul Grice’s notion of conversational implicature. The basic ideas — the cooperative principle, the maxims of conversation, and the contrast between implicature and presupposition — make it clear that conversational implicature is a highly contextualized form of language use that has a lot in common with non-linguistic behavior. But what exactly is its role? We invite the ...

Much of the second language acquisition (SLA) scholarship suggests that conversational skills are best acquired through communication in the target language. Although in recent decades communicative approaches to language teaching have seen widespread adoption in the classroom, it remains exceedingly difficult to assign conversational homework with the tools currently available. This reality ha...

Purpose—We sought to confirm predictions based on past findings that pre-treatment mean length of utterance (MLU) would predict which of two grammatical treatments would best facilitate generalized and maintained grammatical development in preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI). Method—The participants were 57 preschoolers with specific language impairment (SLI). A randomized grou...

The objective of our work is to design a conversational agent (chatterbot) capable of understanding natural language statements in a restricted semantic domain. This feature is intended to allow a natural dialogue with a learner, especially in the context of serious games. This conversational agent will be experimented in a serious game for training staff, by simulating a client. It does not ad...

This article describes research investigating the on-line processing of language in unscripted conversational settings. In particular, we focus on the process of formulating and interpreting definite referring expressions. Within this domain we present results of two eye-tracking experiments addressing the problem of how speakers interrogate the referential domain in preparation to speak, how t...

We illustrate the development of a universal phone recognizer for conversational telephone-quality speech. The acoustic models for this system were trained in a novel fashion and with a wide variety of language data, thus permitting it to recognize most of the world’s major phonemic categories. Moreover, with push-button ease, this recognizer can automatically reconfigure itself to apply the st...

Contrary to what for years has been a widespread belief that conversational data are riddled with mistakes, false starts, and simply ungrammatical data, Pickering and Garrod (2004) extended a challenge primarily to psycholinguists, but also to theoretical linguists that their models should be evaluatable by how well they provide a basis for characterizing the patterns systematically displayed i...

Traditionally conversational interfaces, such as chatbots, have been created in two distinct ways. Either by using natural language parsing methods or by creating conversational trees that utilise the natural Zipf curve distribution of conversations using a tool like AIML. This work describes a hybrid method where conversational trees are developed for specific types of conversations, and then ...

Understanding conversational agents based on large language models can benefit from examining how earlier generations of engaged with people and explored commercial opportunities.