Abstract Working from the perspective of Leech’s (The Pragmatics Politeness. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014) modification to Blum-Kulka et al .’s (Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, NJ, Ablex, 1989) approach classifying requests, this study investigates how far impositive directive speech acts are found in spoken Irish English, a variety English which is well-kno...

We explored children’s spontaneous use of the Onion Street Maths and English message boards out-of-school. These are open-access, study support forums that are widely accessed and well-regarded by teachers and students in the UK. 416 messages were collected on the Maths board and 893 messages were collected on the English board. Sustained engagement was rare. Around 90% of user identities contr...

The Go Wish card game is an advance care planning tool developed by Coda Alliance to help people have conversations about end-of-life care. Initially, this tool was designed as an easy, entertaining exercise for low-functioning assisted-living facility residents, their family members, and their CNA/nursing assistants (many of whom have limited English language skills.) Use of the tool can be pr...

This study used a qualitative design to explore parent mentors' summaries of conversations with more than 1,000 individual families of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children receiving parent-to-parent support as part of an existing family support project. Approximately 35% of the families were Spanish speaking. Five parent mentors who have DHH children provided varied support primarily via the...

We present a mechanism for handling “barge-in” interruptions from a user who is engaged in a ’social’ conversation with an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA). The ECA is designed to recognise and be empathetic to the emotional state of the user. Occasionally, the ECA will attempt to positively influence the user’s emotional state through the conversation. A characteristic of these conversation...

This paper describes the results of the Call Centre Conversation Summarization task at Multiling’15. The CCCS task consists in generating abstractive synopses from call centre conversations between a caller and an agent. Synopses are summaries of the problem of the caller, and how it is solved by the agent. Generating them is a very challenging task given that deep analysis of the dialogs and t...

Abstract This study aimed to investigate how English language teaching textbooks portrayed male and female social actors according to their social roles and gender identities. To examine the linguistic representation of male and female social actors and construction of gender identities in ELT textbooks, Top Notch series was selected. To do so, attempts were made to analyze the series in terms ...

This study explores phonetic convergence during conversations between pairs of talkers with varying language distance. Specifically, we examined conversations within two native English talkers and within two native Korean talkers who had either the same or different regional dialects, and between native and nonnative talkers of English. To measure phonetic convergence, an independent group of l...

In this paper, we describe our experience with collecting and creating an annotated corpus of multi-party online conversations in a chat-room environment. This effort is part of a larger project to develop computational models of social phenomena such as agenda control, influence, and leadership in on-line interactions. Such models will help capturing the dialogue dynamics that are essential fo...