The study is based on qualitative research which aimed to show how four teachers interact in book talks with the students i connection with Swedish lessons in first grade. The study has focused on teachers´ questions to analyze the types of conversational genres that arise in connection with book talks in first grade.  Data was collected through interviews and observations. The interviews and observations were made at a school in the county of Stockholm. Four teachers´ Swedish lessons were observed and they were interviewed about how they describe and explain their use of book talks in Swedish lessons. Hultin´s categorization for speech genres and rhetorical and non-rhetorical questions´ (2006) served as main theoretical frameworks for analyzing the empirical material. From the interviews, I have come to the conclusion that the teachers are aware of different speech genres, and they use rhetorical and non-rhetorical questions for different purposes. The results of the study show that, depending on their purpose with book talk, teachers use different conversational genres.  The reults of the study show that a conversational genre dominated in the book talks that were examined but they also showed elements of other genres to a certain extent. It appears that two conversational genres were dominant in the teaching of teachers, that is, the teaching examination and the text oriented talk. On the other hand the culturally oriented talk and the informal book talk only appeared as compliments to the dominant genres. The study shows that teachers´ awareness of these genres is of great importance for developing the pupils´ reflective minds and skills.

This dissertation advances the affordance utilization model (AUM), which addresses the use of communication modes affordances in personal relationships. Drawing from social penetration theory and research regarding two communication mode affordances--asynchronicity and reduced cues--the AUM predicts that these affordances are positively associated with certain conversational outcomes (specifically, conversational effectiveness and appropriateness, and self-disclosure breadth and depth) but that these associations vary as a function of relationship development. As relationships become more developed, the AUM predicts that communication mode affordances exert less impact on conversational effectiveness, conversational appropriateness, and self-disclosure in conversations in relationships. As a result, the associations between communication mode affordance use and these conversational outcomes are attenuated by relationship development. Regarding self-disclosure depth, the AUM predicts that the association between communication mode affordance use and self-disclosure depth is greatest at moderate levels of relationship development. The AUM also predicts that both use and perceived importance of affordances as a proportion of communication in relationships will decrease as those relationships become more developed. Two studies were conducted to test the AUM. The first surveyed participants regarding their most recent conversation in either a friendship (N = 147) or romantic relationships (N = 166). The second study was a diary study in which participants (N = 64) filled out a short survey after every conversation with their partner for four days. The results of the two studies provide mixed support for the AUM. Although importance of affordances was not associated with relationship development, use of affordances was generally negatively associated with relationship development, as predicted. In general, conversational appropriateness was positively associated with the use of communication mode affordances, and conversational effectiveness, self-disclosure breadth, and self-disclosure depth were negatively associated with affordances. In Study 1, increased relationship development attenuated the association between perceived asynchronicity and both conversational appropriateness and self-disclosure breadth in romantic relationships. In Study 2, increased relationship development attenuated the association between perceived reduced cues and conversational effectiveness. These findings and their implications for the AUM are discussed, and future research directions for the AUM are suggested.

Embodied Conversational Agents (i.e., avatars; ECAs) are appearing in increasingly many everyday contexts, such as e-commerce, occupational training, and airport security. Also common to a typical person's daily life is persuasion. Whether being persuaded or persuading, the ability to change another person's attitude or behavior is a thoroughly researched topic. However, little is known about ECAs' ability to persuade and whether basic persuasion principles from human-human interactions will hold in human-ECA interactions. This work investigates this question. First, a broad review of persuasion literature, which serves as an inventory of manipulations to test in ECA contexts, is presented. This literature review serves an inventory to guide future Persuasive ECA work. The ECA literature is then reviewed. Two preliminary studies exploring the effects of physical attractiveness, voice quality, argument quality, common ground, authority, and facial similarity are presented. Finally, the culminating study testing the effectiveness of ECAs to elicit self-disclosure in automated interviewing is presented and discussed. The findings of that automated interviewing study suggest that ECAs may replace humans in automated interviewing contexts. The findings also suggest that ECAs that are manipulated to look like their interviewees are able to induce greater likeability, establish more rapport, and elicited more self-referencing language than ECAs that do not look like the interviewees.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

From a system developer's perspective, designing a spoken dialogue system can be a time-consuming and difficult process. A developer may spend a lot of time anticipating how a potential user might interact with the system and then deciding on the most appropriate system response. These decisions are encoded in a dialogue strategy, essentially a mapping between anticipated user inputs and appropriate system outputs. To reduce the time and effort associated with developing a dialogue strategy, recent work has concentrated on modelling the development of a dialogue strategy as a sequential decision problem. Using this model, reinforcement learning algorithms have been employed to generate dialogue strategies automatically. These algorithms learn strategies by interacting with simulated users. Some progress has been made with this method but a number of important challenges remain. For instance, relatively little success has been achieved with the large state representations that are typical of real-life systems. Another crucial issue is the time and effort associated with the creation of simulated users. In this thesis, I propose an alternative to existing reinforcement learning methods of dialogue strategy development. More specifically, I explore how XCS, an evolutionary reinforcement learning algorithm, can be used to find dialogue strategies that cover large state spaces. Furthermore, I suggest that hand-coded simulated users are sufficient for the learning of useful dialogue strategies. I argue that the use of evolutionary reinforcement learning and hand-coded simulated users is an effective approach to the rapid development of spoken dialogue strategies. Finally, I substantiate this claim by evaluating a learned strategy with real users. Both the learned strategy and a state-of-the-art hand-coded strategy were integrated into an end-to-end spoken dialogue system. The dialogue system allowed real users to make flight enquiries using a live database for an Edinburgh-based airline. The performance of the learned and hand-coded strategies were compared. The evaluation results show that the learned strategy performs as well as the hand-coded one (81% and 77% task completion respectively) but takes much less time to design (two days instead of two weeks). Moreover, the learned strategy compares favourably with previous user evaluations of learned strategies.

INTRODUCTION: Conversational agents are of great interest in the field of mental health, often in the news these days as a solution to the problem of a limited number of clinicians per patient. Until very recently, little research was actually done in patients with mental health conditions, but rather, only in healthy controls. Little is actually known if those with mental health conditions would want to use conversational agents, and how comfortable they might feel hearing results they would normally hear from a clinician, instead from a chatbot. OBJECTIVES: We asked patients with mental health conditions to ask a chatbot to read a results document to them and tell us how they found the experience. To our knowledge, this is one of the earliest studies to consider actual patient perspectives on conversational agents for mental health, and would inform whether this avenue of research is worth pursuing in the future. Our specific aims are to first and foremost determine the usability of such conversational agent tools, second, to determine their likely adoption among individuals with mental health disorders, and third, to determine whether those using them would grow a sense of artificial trust with the agent. METHODS: We designed and implemented a conversational agent specific to mental health tracking along with a supporting scale able to measure its efficacy in the selected domains of Adoption, Usability, and Trust. These specific domains were selected based on the phases of interaction during a conversation that patients would have with a conversational agent and adapted for simplicity in measurement. Patients were briefly introduced to the technology, our particular conversational agent, and a demo, before using it themselves and taking the survey with the supporting scale thereafter. RESULTS: With a mean score of 3.27 and standard deviation of 0.99 in the Adoption domain, we see that subjects typically felt less than content with adoption but believe that the conversational agent could become commonplace without complicated technical hurdles. With a mean score of 3.4 and standard deviation of 0.93 in the Usability domain, we see that subjects tended to feel more content with the usability of the conversational agent. With a mean score of 2.65 and standard deviation of 0.95 in the Trust domain, we see that subjects felt least content with trusting the conversational agent. CONCLUSIONS: In summary, though conversational agents are now readily accessible and relatively easy to use, we see there is a bridge to be crossed before patients are willing to trust a conversational agent over speaking directly with a clinician in mental health settings. With increased attention, clinic adoption, and patient experience, however, we feel that conversational agents could be readily adopted for simple or routine tasks and requesting information that would otherwise require time, cost, and effort to acquire. The field is still young, however, and with advances in digital technologies and artificial intelligence, capturing the essence of natural language conversation could transform this currently simple tool with limited use-cases into a powerful one for the digital clinician.

Student Number: 8402734 Master of Arts (Speech Pathology) Faculty of Humanities / Comprehension was assessed under various conditions in nine subjects with probable Alzheimer’s Disease. Four linguistic variables were selected, namely syntactic complexity, the use of pronouns, directness and literality. Each variable was assessed in sentences in a simple form and in a complex form. Discourse passages which included all of the variables were then constructed, and these tasks were also administered in simple and complex forms. All subjects performed qualitatively and quantitatively better under the simple conditions than under the complex for all four of the variables assessed. However, this effect was more marked in the sentence tasks than in the discourse tasks. Furthermore, individual subjects responded differently to the manipulation of the variables. Results of the study suggest that modifying the variables investigated can improve the comprehension of people with moderate to severe Alzheimer’s Disease. This has important implications for the training of caregivers and conversational partners, and suggests that this type of indirect intervention may be an effective way for speech therapists to provide clinical services to people with dementia in South Africa.

ABSTRACT Successful communication with patients in a multicultural, multilinguistic environment is a challenge to health professionals, particularly in the context of HIV/Aids and antiretroviral (ARV) treatment. Although the introduction of ARVs has brought hope, high levels of adherence are required to ensure treatment success and numerous barriers to adherence exist. Pharmacists play an important role in encouraging adherence to ARV treatment regimens by providing education and counselling. However, previous research indicates that interactions are often dominated by the pharmacist. Also, verification of patients’ understanding of information is infrequent and that patients are often passive recipients of instructions. This study aims to identify and describe interactive processes in pharmacy interactions while considering the impact of the disease and macro context on communication. Twenty-six cross-cultural, cross-linguistic pharmacist-patient interactions from a South African HIV/Aids pharmacy are described. Data collection included video recordings, interviews with participants and ethnographic observations in the pharmacy. A hybrid analytical approach incorporated aspects of Conversation Analysis (CA) and Discourse Analysis (DA). The results of this study are particularly encouraging. They demonstrate that despite the presence of cultural, linguistic and other contextual barriers, pharmacist-patient interactions can be efficient. The use of facilitative verbal and non-verbal communication strategies ensures that dosage instructions are successfully communicated by the pharmacist to the patient. In line with prior research, collaboration is promoted when pharmacists create rapport and focus on the lifeworld of the patient. The study shows that intuition and sensitivity to atmosphere in interactions is essential for achieving concordance. The disease context of HIV/Aids has a profound influence on the pharmacistpatient interaction and this study demonstrates the significant impact of the macro ii context on micro aspects of communication. The evidence suggests that the nature of humanity and the daily interface between culture and language in South Africa enables pharmacists and patients to transcend some of the barriers to communication and collaboration that have been identified in previous studies. The findings imply that the diversity of South Africa provides both hope and a resource which can inform policy and future practice.

Background: E-commerce is widespread in today’s shopping routines and conversational commerce (CC) as an expansion, aims at integrating customers and businesses on a whole new level. Through the application of chatbots fueled by artificial intelligence, a more personal and individual way of remote shopping is offered. Purpose: Our research question What potential attributes of AI-fueled CC applications and their possible inherent characteristics are determining the willingness to use them and to what extent, in the context of digital natives living in Sweden and Germany? aims at identifying the demanded attributes of conversational commerce from a consumer perspective. Method: We facilitate a quantitative questionnaire with 118 valid answers to administer a traditional full-profile conjoint analysis. Conclusion: Our results indicate that German digital natives deem a CC application’s behavior as the most important attribute, followed by payment method, personality and communication form (voice or text). The Swedish digital natives however, attach the most importance to the payment method, followed by behavior, communication form and personality. Both have in common that they prefer a rather passive behavior over being actively approached, a personality that is balanced between humor and seriousness and text-based communication over voice. A difference is the Swedish preference for direct in-app payment while German digital natives would select a redirection to a secondary payment provider (e.g. PayPal).

O objetivo principal da presente pesquisa é a investigação das estratégias interacionais e cognitivas adotadas por crianças nas suas conversações, em situação lúdica, a fim de que a negociação interpessoal seja estabelecida. Pretendemos, dessa forma, observar como as crianças procederam para desfazer as eventuais complicações que surgiram no curso da negociação, até o restabelecimento de uma troca conversacional equilibrada. Nesse sentido, o estudo em questão nos permitiu compreender melhor a transição entre os momentos de acordo e de desacordo/conflito instaurados nas interações sociais entre as crianças, nos processos de diferenciação \"eu-outro\" (Wallon, 1987). A partir da análise de amostras de interações conversacionais de crianças de 5, 8 e 10 anos, no contexto do evento lúdico (jogo de construção), identificamos as ocorrências de implicaturas conversacionais (Grice, 1982), conflitos, equívocos, regulações discursivas (Caron, 1983) e mecanismos de ameaça e preservação das faces (Goffman, 1967) durante o processo discursivo, que estimularam a criança a argumentar em favor de suas próprias crenças a respeito dos fatos, culminando, muitas vezes, no surgimento da negociação interpessoal com a outra criança e/ou com o adulto. Foi igualmente possível verificar, nesse contexto, a percepção que as crianças têm dos estados mentais (desejos, crenças, intenções, etc.) dos outros que, por sua vez, diferem de seus próprios estados mentais (Perner & Wimmer, 1985). Foram realizadas gravações em áudio de seis pares de crianças, de ambos os sexos, na presença da pesquisadora. Cada sessão foi constituída da gravação de um evento lúdico completo, isto é, pela abertura, desenvolvimento e finalização do jogo. Tais gravações foram transcritas posteriormente, de acordo com as Normas para Transcrição, comumente utilizadas pelos pesquisadores do Projeto NURC/SP Projeto de Estudo da Norma Linguística Urbana Culta de São Paulo. Posteriormente à transcrição dos dados coletados, empreendemos uma análise de cunho qualitativo de amostras de conversação entre as crianças e/ou entre as crianças e a pesquisadora. Considerando-se todos os exemplos analisados, foi possível concluir que há traços interacionais que se sobressaem no contexto conversacional de cada idade observada, o que se reflete na mobilização de diferentes estratégias de negociação interpessoal. / The main objective of this research is to investigate interactional and cognitive strategies adopted by children in their conversations, on a playing situation, in order to establish an interpersonal negotiation. We intend, therefore, to observe how children proceeded to undo eventual complications that arise in the course of negotiation until a balanced conversation is restored. Accordingly, the present study allowed us to better understand the transition between moments of agreement and disagreement/conflict which happens at social interactions among children, described by Wallon in 1987 as the process of differentiating \"self-other\". Analyzing samples from conversational interactions among children aged 5, 8 and 10 years, in a context of a playing event (building game), we have identified instances of conversational implications (Grice, 1982), conflicts, misunderstandings, discursive regulations (Caron , 1983) and mechanisms of threat and face-saving (Goffman, 1967) during the discursive process, which encouraged children to argue for their own beliefs about facts, resulting often in the emergence of interpersonal negotiation with another child and/or with adults. In this context, it was also possible to verify the perception that children have about mental conditions of others (desires, beliefs, intentions, etc.), which differ from their own mental conditions (Perner & Wimmer, 1985). Audio recordings were made of six pairs of children from both sexes, in the presence of the researcher. Each session consisted on a recording of a complete playing event, which encompasses the opening, development and completion of the game. These recordings were transcribed later, according to the Standards for transcription, commonly used by researchers from the NURC / SP - Project for the Study of the Cult Urban Language Standard of São Paulo. After the transcription of data collected, we undertook a qualitative analysis of samples from conversation between children and/or between children and researcher. Considering all samples analyzed, it was possible to conclude that there are interactional traces which stand out in conversational context on each observed age, which is reflected in the utilization of different interpersonal negotiation strategies.