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The Pragmatics Of Economics Experts’ Engagement With Non-Specialists, Brendan O'Rourke, Jens Maesse

Other

A Call for Papers for Panel on Economics and Language Use: The pragmatics of economics experts’ engagement with non-specialists, 15th International Pragmatics Conference (IPrA2017) to be held in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 16-21 July 2017.

Reflexive And Reciprocal Constructions In Modern Irish, Brian Nolan

The ITB Journal

This paper examines reflexive (and reciprocal) constructions in modern Irish, a VSOX language for which the generative analysis using c-command is problematic. Reflexive and reciprocal constructions are best reflected in the inherent VSOX word order. The reflexive occurs in transitive constructions with the reflexive marker féin, which can also be used non-reflexively but emphatically. A continuum is observed with a human/animate participant as the subject argument at the reflexive pole and a nonhuman inanimate at the emphatic end. Motion is an ingredient in reflexivity. Fictive or nontranslational motion are both non-reflexive. Translational motion alone allows reflexivity. Reciprocals are complex in …

Passive Voice Constructions In Modern Irish, Brian Nolan

The ITB Journal

This paper is about the passive construction, of which modern Irish (a VSO language) has two primary forms, the personal passive and its variants, and the impersonal. An empirical question is posed as to whether a third passive form exists within the language, that of a functionally defined GET-passive. To deliver a unified analysis of the various passive constructions, a perspective that takes account of the complete event is necessary.

Emotional Facial Expressions In Synthesised Sign Language Avatars: A Manual Evaluation., Robert G Smith, Brian Nolan

Other Resources

This research explores and evaluates the contribution that facial expressions might have regarding improved comprehension and acceptability in sign language avatars. Focusing specifically on Irish sign language (ISL), the Deaf (the uppercase ‘‘D’’ in the word ‘‘Deaf’’ indicates Deaf as a culture as opposed to ‘‘deaf’’ as a medical condition) community’s responsiveness to sign language avatars is examined. The hypothesis of this is as follows: augmenting an existing avatar with the seven widely accepted universal emotions identified by Ekman (Basic emotions: handbook of cognition and emotion. Wiley, London, 2005) to achieve underlying facial expressions will make that avatar more human-like …

Providing Objective Metrics Of Team Communication Skills Via Interpersonal Coordination Mechanisms, Celine De Looze, Brian Vaughan, Finnian Kelly, Alison Kay

Conference Papers

Being able to communicate efficiently has been acknowledged as a vital skill in many different domains. In particular, team communication skills are of key importance in the operation of complex machinery such as aircrafts, maritime vessels and such other, highly-specialized, civilian or military vehicles, as well as the performance of complex tasks in the medical domain. In this paper, we propose to use prosodic accommodation and turn- taking organisation to provide objective metrics of communica- tion skills. To do this, human-factors evaluations, via a coordi- nation Demand Analysis (CDA), were used in conjunction with a dynamic model of prosodic accommodation …

Providing Objective Metrics Of Team Communication Skills Via Interpersonal Coordination Mechanisms, Celine De Looze, Brian Vaughan, Finnian Kelly, Alison Kay

Conference papers

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Emotion And Facial Expression In Synthesised Sign Language Avatars, Robert G Smith

Other Resources

This thesis explores the role that underlying emotional facial expressions might have in regards to understandability in sign language avatars. Focusing specifically on Irish Sign Language (ISL), we examine the Deaf community’s requirement for a visual-gestural language as well as some linguistic attributes of ISL which we consider fundamental to this research. Unlike spoken language, visual-gestural languages such as ISL have no standard written representation. Given this, we compare current methods of written representation for signed languages as we consider: which, if any, is the most suitable transcription method for the medical receptionist dialogue corpus. A growing body of work …

The Effect Of Sensor Errors In Situated Human-Computer Dialogue, Niels Schütte, John D. Kelleher, Brian Mac Namee

Conference papers

Errors in perception are a problem for computer systems that use sensors to perceive the environment. If a computer system is engaged in dialogue with a human user, these problems in perception lead to problems in the dialogue. We present two experiments, one in which participants interact through dialogue with a robot with perfect perception to fulfil a simple task, and a second one in which the robot is affected by sensor errors and compare the resulting dialogues to determine whether the sensor problems have an impact on dialogue success.

Perception Based Misunderstandings In Human-Computer Dialogues, Niels Schütte, John D. Kelleher, Brian Mac Namee

Articles

In a situated dialogue, misunderstandings may arise if the participants perceive or interpret the environment in different ways. In human-computer dialogue this may be due the sensor errors. We present an experiment system and a series of experiments in which we investigate this problem.

Evaluating The Similarity Estimator Component Of The Twin Personality-Based Recommender System, Alexandra Roshchina, John Cardiff, Paolo Rosso

Conference Papers

With the constant increase in the amount of information available in online communities, the task of building an appropriate Recommender System to support the user in her decision making process is becoming more and more challenging. In addition to the classical collaborative filtering and content based approaches, taking into account ratings, preferences and demographic characteristics of the users, a new type of Recommender System, based on personality parameters, has been emerging recently. In this paper we describe the TWIN (Tell Me What I Need) Personality Based Recommender System, and report on our experiments and experiences of utilizing techniques which allow …

Context Cues For Classification Of Competitive And Collaborative Overlaps, Catharine Oertel, Marcin Wlodarczak, Alexey Tarasov, Nick Campbell, Petra Wagner

Conference papers

Being able to respond appropriately to users’ overlaps should be seen as one of the core competencies of incremental dialogue systems. At the same time identifying whether an interlocutor wants to support or grab the turn is a task which comes naturally to humans, but has not yet been implemented in such systems. Motivated by this we first investigate whether prosodic characteristics of speech in the vicinity of overlaps are significantly different from prosodic characteristics in the vicinity of non-overlapping speech. We then test the suitability of different context sizes, both preceding and following but excluding features of the overlap, …

User Profile Construction In The Twin Personality-Based Recommender System, Alexandra Roshchina, John Cardiff, Paolo Rosso

Conference Papers

The information overload experienced by peo- ple who use online services and read user- generated content (e.g. product reviews and ratings) to make their decisions has led to the development of the so-called recommender systems. We address the problem of the large increase in the user-generated reviews, which are added to each day and consequently make it difficult for the user to obtain a clear picture of the quality of the facility in which they are interested.

In this paper, we describe the TWIN (“Tell me What I Need”) personality-based recom- mender system, the aim of which is to select …

Research, Development And Application Of A Learning Resource For Enhancing Listening And Spoken Skills In Spanish, Elena Paz Vizcaya

Conference papers

Native speech is directed towards native listeners, not designed for comprehension and analysis by language learners. Speed of delivery - or economy of effort - produce a speech signal to which the native listener can assign the correct words — there are no discrete words in the speech signal itself. Experience of using timescaling with recorded English has highlighted the benefit of making slowED speech available to the language learner or researcher, as opposed to slow speech – i.e delivered slowly. The main contribution to knowledge of this project is to generate a unique research and analysis corpus (audio resource) …

Situating Spatial Templates For Human-Robot Interaction, John D. Kelleher, Robert J. Ross, Brian Mac Namee, Colm Sloan

Conference papers

People often refer to objects by describing the object's spatial location relative to another object. Due to their ubiquity in situated discourse, the ability to use 'locative expressions' is fundamental to human-robot dialogue systems. A key component of this ability are computational models of spatial term semantics. These models bridge the grounding gap between spatial language and sensor data. Within the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics communities, spatial template based accounts, such as the Attention Vector Sum model (Regier and Carlson, 2001), have found considerable application in mediating situated human-machine communication (Gorniak, 2004; Brenner et a., 2007; Kelleher and Costello, 2009). …

Visual Salience And Reference Resolution In Situated Dialogues: A Corpus-Based Evaluation., Niels Schütte, John D. Kelleher, Brian Mac Namee

Conference papers

Dialogues between humans and robots are necessarily situated and so, often, a shared visual context is present. Exophoric references are very frequent in situated dialogues, and are particularly important in the presence of a shared visual context - for example when a human is verbally guiding a tele-operated mobile robot. We present an approach to automatically resolving exophoric referring expressions in a situated dialogue based on the visual salience of possible referents. We evaluate the effectiveness of this approach and a range of different salience metrics using data from the SCARE corpus which we have augmented with visual information. The …

New Trends In Automatic Assessment: Ontology Matching, Maria Mitina, Patricia Magee, John Cardiff

Conference Papers

Instant individual feedback represents a result of assessment which allows for considerable improvements in both teaching and learning. In this paper we present the application of ontology matching techniques in automatic correction of students’ answers for SQL tests, which will provide teachers with instant feedback to facilitate manual correction and marking and which they can pass to the students. Students experience many problems learning SQL due to the necessity to memorise database schemas, unclear feedback from the database engine on the execution of the query, etc. The program environment utilising the described approach is designed to solve the abovementioned problems …

Topology In Composite Spatial Terms, John D. Kelleher, Robert J. Ross

Conference papers

People often refer to objects by describing the object's spatial location relative to another object, e.g. the book on the right of the table. This type of referring expression is called a spatial locative expression. Spatial locatives have three major components: (1) the target object that is being located (the book), (2) the landmark object relative to which the target is being located (the table), and (3) the description of the spatial relationship that exists between the target and the landmark (on the right of ). In English spatial relationships are often described using spatial prepositions. The set of English …

Proceedings Of The Sixth International Natural Language Generation Conference (Inlg 2010)., John D. Kelleher, Brian Mac Namee, Ielka Van Der Sluis

Conference papers

No abstract provided.

Personal Sense And Idiolect: Combining Authorship Attribution And Opinion Analysis, Polina Panicheva, John Cardiff, Paolo Rosso

Conference Papers

Subjectivity analysis and authorship attribution are very popular areas of research. However, work in these two areas has been done separately. We believe that by combining information about subjectivity in texts and authorship, the performance of both tasks can be improved. In the paper a personalized approach to opinion mining is presented, in which the notions of personal sense and idiolect are introduced and used for polarity classification task. The results of applying the personalized approach to opinion mining are presented, confirming that the approach increases the performance of the opinion mining task. Automatic authorship attribution is further applied to …

Measuring Variations Of Mimicry By Means Of Prosodic Cues In Task-Based Scenarios And Conversational Speech, Brian Vaughan, Celine De Looze

Other resources

Here, we address the measurement of mimicry, that is when speakers’ speech variations look like parallel patterns.

As a definition of mimicry, we often read in the literature description such as mimicry is “The situation where the observed behaviours of two inter-actants although dissimilar at the start of the interaction are moving towards behavioral matching”. These types of descriptions imply that mimicry is a linear phenomenon and that speakers tend to imitate over time. However, it can be assumed, especially when studying spontaneous speech, that there are rather phases of mimicry and non-mimicry and that mimicry should be rather …

Dit’S Dynamic Speech Corpus, Dermot Campbell, Ciaran Mcdonnell, Marty Meinardi, Charles Pritchard, Bunny Richardson, Yi Wang

Articles

The Technological University Dublin’s FLUENT Dynamic Speech Corpus is aimed at learners, teachers, authors and researchers. When the prototype is complete (target: July 2009) it will afford access to a unique audio resource based on dialogues. Users will be able to find samples of native-to-native speech on a chosen topic, listen to phonetically interesting sections and explore the dynamic environment which gave rise to the spoken features studied. At all stages the user will be able to slow down sequences for heightened intelligibility.

Applying Computational Models Of Spatial Prepositions To Visually Situated Dialog, John D. Kelleher, Fintan Costello

Articles

This article describes the application of computational models of spatial prepositions to visually situated dialog systems. In these dialogs, spatial prepositions are important because people often use them to refer to entities in the visual context of a dialog. We first describe a generic architecture for a visually situated dialog system and highlight the interactions between the spatial cognition module, which provides the interface to the models of prepositional semantics, and the other components in the architecture. Following this, we present two new computational models of topological and projective spatial prepositions. The main novelty within these models is the fact …

Dit’S Dynamic Speech Corpus, Dermot Campbell, Ciaran Mcdonnell, Marty Meinardi, Charles Pritchard, Bunny Richardson, Yi Wang

Conference papers

Given the current focus of language learning on learner autonomy, the Technological University Dublin is using its FLUENT project (commencement date 7/1/’08) to produce a Dynamic Speech Corpus, which will be a valuable resource for learners, teachers, authors and researchers. The resultant database will afford access to a unique audio resource based on unscripted dialogues between friends, characterized by industry-standard audio quality (for analysis purposes) and a high degree of naturalness. By means of search string and/or tags such as speaker intention, users will be able to find samples of native-to-native speech (various L1 varieties) on a chosen topic, particularly …

The Coke Side Of Life:An Exploration Of Pre-Schoolers' Constructions Of Product And Selves Through Talk-In-Interaction Around Coca-Cola, Olivia Freeman

Articles

Abstract Purpose – This paper proposes the activity-based focus group as a useful method with which to generate talk-in-interaction among pre-schoolers. Analytically, it aims to illustrate, how transcribed talk-in-interaction can be subjected to a discourse analytic lens, to produce insights into how pre-schoolers use ‘Coca-Cola’ as a conversational resource with which to build product-related meanings and social selves. Design/methodology/approach - Fourteen activity-based discussion groups with pre-schoolers aged between two and five years have been conducted in a number of settings including privately run Montessori schools and community based preschools in Dublin. The talk generated through these groups has been transcribed …

Referring Expression Generation Challenge 2008 Dit System Descriptions (Dit-Fbi, Dit-Tvas, Dit-Cbsr, Dit-Rbr, Dit-Fbi-Cbsr, Dit-Tvas-Rbr), John D. Kelleher, Brian Mac Namee

Conference papers

This papers desibes a set of systems developed at DIT for the Referring Expression Generation challenage at INLG 2008.In Proceedings of the 5th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG-08)

Prototype Speech Corpus, Dermot Campbell, Yi Wang, Ciaran Mcdonnell

Conference papers

DIT’s prototype speech corpus allows language learners and researchers access to real, informal dialogues–not just the transcripts of dialogues. Because the dialogues were created at a very high acoustic level they are capable of being slowed down using a time-scaling tool for more detailed study of speech production. The recording methodology used produces a natural dialogue exhibiting all the features of native-to-native interchanges. The speech corpus is capable of serving the needs of students and researchers of spoken language. LinguaTag is the first prototype tool within the language work package in the FP6 EU project SALERO to automatically tag speech …

Task-Based Mood Induction Procedures For The Elicitation Of Natural Emotional Responses., Brian Vaughan, Charlie Cullen, Spyros Kousidis, Yi Wang

Other resources

This paper details experimental procedures designed to elicit real emotional responses from participants within a controlled acoustic environment. The experiments use Mood Induction Procedures (MIP’s), specifically MIP 4, to implement a co-operative task using two participants. These cooperative tasks are designed to engender emotional responses of activation and evaluation from the participants who are situated in separate isolation booths, thus reducing unwanted noise in the signal, preventing the participants from being distracted and ensuring a cleanly recorded audio signal. The audio is recorded at a professional level of quality (24bit/192Khz). The emotional dimensions of each audio recording will be evaluated …

Proceedings Of The 4th Acl-Sigsem Workshop On Prepositions At Acl-2007., Fintan Costello, John D. Kelleher, Martin Volk

Conference papers

This volume contains the papers presented at the Fourth ACL-SIGSEM Workshop on Prepositions. This workshop is endorsed by the ACL Special Interest Group on Semantics (ACL-SIGSEM), and is hosted in conjunction with ACL 2007, taking place on 28th June, 2007 in Prague, the Czech Republic.

Frequency Based Incremental Attribute Selection For Gre., John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

The DIT system uses an incremental greedy search to generate descriptions, similar to the incremental algorithm described in (Dale and Reiter, 1995). The selection of the next attribute to be tested for inclusion in the description is ordered by the absolute frequency of each attribute in the training corpus. Attributes are selected in descending order of frequency (i.e. the attribute that occurred most frequently in the training corpus is selected first). Where two or more attributes have the same frequency of occurrence the first attribute found with that frequency is selected. The type attribute is always included in the description. …

Natural English In Speaking And Listening Activities, Dermot Campbell, Marty Meinardi, Bunny Richardson, Yi Wang

Conference papers

DIT Speech Research Cluster will present recommendations for materials development based on the technologies and methodologies they are developing in the area of listening skills and the use of natural English in learning situations. The first speaker will address features of native speech flow which cause difficulties for EFL students (Brown, Cauldwell) and establish the need for improvements in the teaching of listening skills. She will give examples of elision, assimilation and weak forms, and how these can be made accessible for study using DIT’s slow-down technology, which gives students more time to study native speech features, without tonal distortion. …