Texte remanié de: Diss.--Philosophische Fakultät--Universität Zürich, 1998. / Bibliogr. p. 193-202.

This dissertation argues for a dialogic grounding for deliberative democracy. Building on Habermasian theories of communication and discourse, deliberative democrats think better (more just, fair, and rational) democratic politics is possible because communication itself (in whatever form it takes) provides the legitimate mechanism for the transformation of citizens' opinions and political will. However, this is a problematic foundation for unleashing the normative potential inherent in citizen engagement. There are good reasons to suspect that a politics based in rational communication cannot actually produce the kinds of changes deliberativists insist are possible. Practical limitations of scale and scope make deliberative democracy difficult to envision. And the Habermasian claim about the inherent rationality in communication is challenged by postmodern notions of language and by conceptions of the embodied processes of reasoning. However, there is another normative foundation hinted at within the deliberative literature. Some theorists gesture toward a theory of transformation rooted more directly in the experiences associated with interpersonal relations, rather than in the language that is exchanged within these interactions. Following this lead, I turn to the work of Martin Buber to outline a dialogic theory that can better explain the intuitive sense that when citizens meet and speak, they are (at least potentially) opened up to new understandings. This theory, based in Buber's "I-Thou relation" and conception of "genuine dialogue," offers an account of the phenomenon located in an interpersonal relation of a particular type in which partners in dialogue are opened up to one another. I argue that a politics rooted in this dialogic experience provides a better account of the transformative potential in citizen engagement. Building on this new orientation towards dialogue, I then demonstrate some practical institutional innovations that are well equipped to take advantage of a politics anchored in dialogue. Along these lines, the dissertation culminates in a discussion of the Restorative Listening Project in Portland, Oregon, where dialogic meeting was a central focus of the institution's efforts to deal with the problem of gentrification in the city's NE neighborhoods.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-09T12:28:10Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2014-02-14Bitstream added on 2015-04-09T12:48:04Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 000816183.pdf: 2492668 bytes, checksum: 9e58f77b807373cd5e398453c1b396c6 (MD5) / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) / Ao considerar o cinema musical como um gênero fértil para o estudo de diálogos entre gêneros, esta pesquisa reflete acerca do filme musical Across the Universe (2007), de Julie Taymor, em sua arquitetônica (forma, estilo e conteúdo). O gênero cinema e o gênero canção encontram-se em constante diálogo no musical e, especificamente, no corpus aqui trabalhado. As canções inseridas no filme são todas compostas pela banda britânica The Beatles. As relações dialógicas e as genericidades reconhecidas nesta pesquisa são trabalhadas sob a ótica dos estudos do Círculo de Bakhtin e buscam analisar como o filme Across the Universe incorpora as canções de The Beatles e de que maneira o musical dialoga com a letra de cada canção e com cada situação em que são interpretadas no filme. Sob a abordagem dialógica do Círculo, a análise do filme em questão possibilita reconhecer o cinema como característico por ser composto por outros gêneros que a ele se incorporam e fundem em sua composição, como ocorre em Across the Universe, em que a canção e a dança, por exemplo, são parte da construção do cinema musical / Considering cinema as a fertile genre for the studies of dialogue between genres this research thinks about the musical film Across the Universe (2007), by Julie Taymor, in its architectonic (form, style and content). The cinema genre and the song genre are in constant dialogue in the musical film and specifically in the corpus chosen. The songs within the movie are all composed by the british band The Beatles. The dialogical relations and the genres recognized in this research are analyzed within the perspective of the studies of the Bakhtin Circle Bakhtin, and aim to analyze how the movie Across the Universe incorporates the songs by The Beatles and in which way the musical dialogues with the lyrics of each song and with each situation in which they are sung in the movie. Within the dialogical perspective of the Circle the analysis of the movie makes it possible to recognize the cinema as composed by other genres that are incorporated within its composition, such as in Across the Universe, in which song and dance are part of the composition of the musical film

Les systèmes de dialogue incrémentaux sont capables d’entamer le traitement des paroles de l’utilisateur au moment même où il les prononce (sans attendre de signal de fin de phrase tel un long silence par exemple). Ils peuvent ainsi prendre la parole à n’importe quel moment et l’utilisateur peut faire de même (et interrompre le système). De ce fait, ces systèmes permettent d’effectuer une plus large palette de comportements de prise de parole en comparaison avec les systèmes de dialogue traditionnels. Cette thèse s’articule autour de la problématique suivante : est-il possible pour un système de dialogue incrémental d’apprendre une stratégie optimale de prise de parole de façon autonome? Tout d’abord, une analyse des mécanismes sous-jacents à la dynamique de prise de parole dans une conversation homme-homme a permis d’établir une taxonomie de ces phénomènes. Ensuite, une nouvelle architecture permettant de doter les systèmes de dialogues conventionnels de capacités de traitement incrémentales de la parole, à moindre coût, a été proposée. Dans un premier temps, un simulateur de dialogue destiné à répliquer les comportements incrémentaux de l’utilisateur et de la reconnaissance vocale a été développé puis utilisé pour effectuer les premier tests de stratégies de dialogue incrémentales. Ces dernières ont été développées à base de règles issues de l’analyse effectuée lors de l’établissement de la taxonomie des phénomènes de prise de parole. Les résultats de la simulation montrent que le caractère incrémental permet d’obtenir des interactions plus efficaces. La meilleure stratégie à base de règles a été retenue comme référence pour la suite. Dans un second temps, une stratégie basée sur l’apprentissage par renforcement a été implémentée. Elle est capable d’apprendre à optimiser ses décisions de prise de parole de façon totalement autonome étant donnée une fonction de récompense. Une première comparaison, en simulation, a montré que cette stratégie engendre des résultats encore meilleurs par rapport à la stratégie à base de règles. En guise de validation, une expérience avec des utilisateurs réels a été menée (interactions avec une maison intelligente). Une amélioration significative du taux de complétion de tâche a été constatée dans le cas de la stratégie apprise par renforcement et ce, sans dégradation de l’appréciation globale par les utilisateurs de la qualité du dialogue (en réalité, une légère amélioration a été constatée). / Incremental dialogue systems are able to process the user’s speech as it is spoken (without waiting for the end of a sentence before starting to process it). This makes them able to take the floor whenever they decide to (the user can also speak whenever she wants, even if the system is still holding the floor). As a consequence, they are able to perform a richer set of turn-taking behaviours compared to traditional systems. Several contributions are described in this thesis with the aim of showing that dialogue systems’ turn-taking capabilities can be automatically improved from data. First, human-human dialogue is analysed and a new taxonomy of turn-taking phenomena in human conversation is established. Based on this work, the different phenomena are analysed and some of them are selected for replication in a human-machine context (the ones that are more likely to improve a dialogue system’s efficiency). Then, a new architecture for incremental dialogue systems is introduced with the aim of transforming a traditional dialogue system into an incremental one at a low cost (also separating the turn-taking manager from the dialogue manager). To be able to perform the first tests, a simulated environment has been designed and implemented. It is able to replicate user and ASR behaviour that are specific to incremental processing, unlike existing simulators. Combined together, these contributions led to the establishement of a rule-based incremental dialogue strategy that is shown to improve the dialogue efficiency in a task-oriented situation and in simulation. A new reinforcement learning strategy has also been proposed. It is able to autonomously learn optimal turn-taking behavious throughout the interactions. The simulated environment has been used for training and for a first evaluation, where the new data-driven strategy is shown to outperform both the non-incremental and rule-based incremental strategies. In order to validate these results in real dialogue conditions, a prototype through which the users can interact in order to control their smart home has been developed. At the beginning of each interaction, the turn-taking strategy is randomly chosen among the non-incremental, the rule-based incremental and the reinforcement learning strategy (learned in simulation). A corpus of 206 dialogues has been collected. The results show that the reinforcement learning strategy significantly improves the dialogue efficiency without hurting the user experience (slightly improving it, in fact).

Le dialogue culturel méditerranéen connaît aujourd'hui une période difficile. Or, à la fois connexe et indépendante, la dimension religieuse offre un autre canal possible de dialogue dans les relations méditerranéennes. Les transformations du regard chrétien porté sur l'islam amorcées dès l'entre-deux-guerres, puis les pratiques du dialogue entre chrétiens et musulmans, en métropole et outre-Méditerranée, favorisent progressivement l'affirmation du dialogue islamo-chrétien sur le devant de la scène méditerranéenne. Dans les années 1960, le concile Vatican II marque un temps fort dans ce processus. Rattrapé par ses propres ambiguïtés et soumis aux forces de la géopolitique méditerranéenne, le dialogue islamo-chrétien entre cependant, à la fin des années 1970, dans une période plus chaotique rythmée aussi bien par des actes symboliques en faveur de la paix que par des crispations identitaires. En faisant appel à diverses sources de documentation, en particulier le fonds réuni par le Service des Relations avec l'Islam (SRI), ce travail propose un panorama historique des acteurs, des enjeux et des limites du dialogue islamo-chrétien en Méditerranée au XXe siècle. Des retours sur l'histoire et les acteurs marseillais illustrent ces évolutions. / Intercultural dialogue in the Mediterranean is undergoing hard times. However the religious dimension, connected and independent at the same time, offers another possible channel of dialogue in the Mediterranean relations. The transformations of the Christian perception of Islam started during the interwar period, then the practices of the dialogue between Christians and Muslims, in mainland France and beyond the Mediterranean Sea, gradually promote the Islamo-Christian dialogue on the Mediterranean forefront. In the 1960s, the Second Vatican Council stands out in this process. Trapped inside its own ambiguities and conditioned by Mediterranean geopolitical settings, the Islamo-Christian dialogue however enters a much more chaotic period punctuated both by symbolic acts for peace and identical tensions at the end of 1970s. Inspiring by multiple documentation sources, in particular by the collection of the Service des Relations avec l'Islam (SRI), the present work offers an historic overview of the actors, the stakes and the limits of the Islamo-Christian dialogue in the Mediterranean Sea throughout the 20th century. Historic reviews and the actors from Marseille illustrate such development.

Dialogue promises a natural and effective method for users to interact with and obtain information from computer systems. Statistical spoken dialogue systems are able to disambiguate in the presence of errors by maintaining probability distributions over what they believe to be the state of a dialogue. However, traditionally these distributions have been derived using generative models, which do not directly optimise for the criterion of interest and cannot easily exploit arbitrary information that may potentially be useful. This thesis presents how discriminative methods can overcome these problems in Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) and Dialogue State Tracking (DST). A robust method for SLU is proposed, based on features extracted from the full posterior distribution of recognition hypotheses encoded in the form of word confusion networks. This method uses discriminative classifiers, trained on unaligned input/output pairs. Performance is evaluated on both an off-line corpus, and on-line in a live user trial. It is shown that a statistical discriminative approach to SLU operating on the full posterior ASR output distribution can substantially improve performance in terms of both accuracy and overall dialogue reward. Furthermore, additional gains can be obtained by incorporating features from the system's output. For DST, a new word-based tracking method is presented that maps directly from the speech recognition results to the dialogue state without using an explicit semantic decoder. The method is based on a recurrent neural network structure that is capable of generalising to unseen dialogue state hypotheses, and requires very little feature engineering. The method is evaluated in the second and third Dialog State Tracking Challenges, as well as in a live user trial. The results demonstrate consistently high performance across all of the off-line metrics and a substantial increase in the quality of the dialogues in the live trial. The proposed method is shown to be readily applied to expanding dialogue domains, by exploiting robust features and a new method for online unsupervised adaptation. It is shown how the neural network structure can be adapted to output structured joint distributions, giving an improvement over estimating the dialogue state as a product of marginal distributions.

Many things can be communicated through dialogue, including information, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, beliefs and personal experiences. More recently, dialogues have been used in focus group research and in program evaluations. Despite the increasing prevalence of dialogue in research and evaluation, much is still unknown about dialogue, especially how dialogue emerges and occurs within a group setting. The aim of the current study was to describe and identify the various factors involved in a dialogue, examine the relationships among these factors, and conceptualize the process of dialogue within a multi-stakeholder participatory evaluation. A qualitative analysis of three focus groups, each comprised of eight to ten participants, yielded several findings. First, several factors were found to help facilitate the interactions between multiple stakeholders in dialogue, including the development of common ground and specific contributions made by participants. Secondly, communication within these multiple stakeholder groups was found to alternate between two individuals, a dyadic exchange, or between multiple participants, a complex exchange. Thirdly, the moderator and participants were found to take on each other roles. Finally, from these conversations, a model was developed to illustrate the progression of a dialogue in these groups. These results have many implications for program evaluators, focus group leaders, and other practitioners in the field.

Thesis advisor: Vincent Cho / Leading for equity is a challenging endeavor. One leadership practice that fosters equitable learning environments is engaging in dialogue and reflection. When district leaders participate in dialogue and reflection, their discourse helps them derive meaning, and in turn, shapes their understanding of the critical and complex issues related to fostering equity. As part of a group qualitative case study about district leadership practices that foster equity in one diverse Massachusetts school district, the purpose of this individual study was to better understand how district leaders used framing during dialogue and reflection. More specifically it addressed how they used framing processes (Bedford and Snow, 2000) when engaging in equity talk. Utilizing inductive reasoning for data gathered by semi-structured interviews, observations, and document review, this study identified equity talk manifesting as one of three themes: diversity as an asset, decision-making processes, and use of data and feedback. Understanding how and when specific framing processes are used can empower district leaders to be more strategic in impacting stakeholder thinking and language and maintaining an equity focus. / Thesis (EdD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

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Despite the evidence that supports the benefits of a holistic, collaborative approach to autism intervention, but there is little training to teach those skills to professionals. Behavior analysts working in applied settings will often partner with different individuals from very different backgrounds and disciplines. Skilled Dialogue has been recommended as an approach to conversations that values everyone's contributions in fostering compassionate, collaborative, and culturally responsive care to benefit the children served. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of a training workshop to teach the concept and strategies of skilled dialogue to behavior analysts in training. The participants were taught and practiced using the six strategies of Skilled Dialogue: welcoming, allowing, sense-making, appreciating, joining, and harmonizing through use of instructions, rationales, activities, simulations, and feedback. The success of the training was evaluated using a multiple baseline design across training components. Audio and video responses to role-play scenarios were recorded, transcribed, and scored to measure the results of the training workshop on communication skills. The results suggested that the training workshop was an effective method to teaching future behavior analysts how to engage in the strategies and components of skilled dialogue, increasingly the likelihood of collaborative, and children centered communication and care.