26 January: DCLRS -- Pat Healey, "Dialogue as Repair-driven Co-ordination",
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar: Index of January 2009 | Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of year: 2009 | Full index
Seminar Announcement:
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar
DCLRS 2008/2009
DCU DIT TCD UCD
Venue: Jonathan Swift Lecture Theatre (Arts Building 2041a)
Trinity College Dublin
Time: 16:00, Friday, January 30, 2009
Title:
Interactive Misalignment:
Dialogue as Repair-driven Co-ordination
Speaker:
Professor Pat Healey
Interaction, Media and Communication Research Group,
School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
Queen Mary, University of London
Abstract:
Convergence --the tendency for people to align with each other's
speech style, body movement and language use in conversation-- is
widely seen as characteristic of successful human communication (see
Giles, Coupland and Coupland, 1991 for a review). Recently, it has
been proposed that convergence is the result of a basic priming
mechanism that underpins all successful dialogue (Pickering and Garrod
2004, Garrod and Pickering 2006). I will argue against this view.
Conceptually, the claim that priming is the central mechanism of
co-ordination in dialogue is vulnerable to a reductio ad absurdum; it
implies that conversations should become locked into cycles of
verbatim repetition. More importantly, it also presupposes that
conversational participants have the same lexical, syntactic and
semantic repertoires and that co-ordination consists in selection
between these shared alternatives. Radical nativism notwithstanding,
it seems unlikely that any two people ever satisfy this ideal.
Priming also cannot account for innovations in language use. Using
data from corpus analyses I will show that a) repetition in dialogue
is in fact rare and that b) repair sequences (in which problems with
mutual-intelligibility are directly encountered and addressed) are
common. These observations are used to motivate the claim that
misalignment is the norm and that it is the processes for dealing with
this that are the central mechanisms of dialogue co-ordination. This
claim is tested by two chat-tool experiments which selectively
interfere with people's ability to engage in repair. The results show
that this manipulation has a marked effect on people's ability to
co-ordinate their language use. This leads to a view of dialogue as a
contingent, repair-driven, co-ordination process in which languages
are continuously adapted to the evolving needs of participants.
Winter Schedule:
January 16 John Tait (Sunderland)
January 23 Gerhard Jaeger (Bielefeld)
January 30 Pat Healey (Queen Mary)
February 6 Sebastian Moeller
February 13 Alfredo Maldonado Guerra (Microsoft Dublin)
February 20 Dietmar Janetzko (NCI)
February 27 Steve Pulman (Oxford)
March 6 Tim Fernando (TCD)
March 13 Andreas Vlachos (Cambridge)
March 20 Paul Piwek (Open U)
Spring Schedule:
April 3 Tomaz Erjavec (Institute Josef Stefan)
April 10 Public Holiday
April 17 TBA
April 24 Frank Keller (Edinburgh)
May 1 TBA
May 8 Brian Murphy (Trento)
May 15 Kees van Deemter (Aberdeen)
May 22 Elisabeth Andre (Augsburg)
May 29 TBA
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of January 2009 | Index of year: 2009 | Full index