27 May: DCLRS -- Pat Healey, Friday, June 3, 16:00 (TCD Lloyd Building 01)
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar: Index of May 2016 | Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of year: 2016 | Full index
Friday of next week (June 3), at 16:00, in room LB01, Lloyd Building
(TCD), Professor Pat Healey (Queen Mary University of London) speaks
on:
Running Repairs: The importance of negative evidence for semantic
co-ordination in dialogue.
Work on language co-ordination in dialogue has normally focussed on
'positive' evidence of understanding such as the feedback provided by
nods or agreement. This paper explores the hypothesis that the
'negative' evidence derived from misunderstanding plays a critical
role in co-ordinating understanding. We describe two chat tool
experiments that involve relatively fine-grained manipulations of live
conversation. The first experiment involves selectively weakening of
grounding cues (e.g. "Okay" is replaced by "Uhmm") during
task-oriented dialogue. The results show that this manipulation
interferes with confidence but not semantic coordination. The second
experiment involves exaggerating people's clarification questions by
dynamically substituting relatively specifc questions with more
generic ones (e.g. substituting "On the left" with "what"?). Perhaps
surprisingly, this manipulation leads to significantly stronger
semantic coordination. We argue that negative evidence promotes
semantic co-ordination by providing important constraints that help
people narrow down their possible interpretations.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Pat Healey is Professor of Human Interaction in the Cognitive Science
research group of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer
Science within Queen Mary University of London. He is also Senior
Researcher in Residence at the Digital Catapult.
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The Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar series is a
cooperation among Trinity College Dublin, Dublin City University,
University College Dublin and the Dublin Institute of Technology, a
long standing collaboration which overlaps with the SFI CNGL/ADAPT
centres.
www.scss.tcd.ie/disciplines/intelligent_systems/clg/clg_web/DCLRS
Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar - Index of May 2016 | Index of year: 2016 | Full index