Caregiver-child conversation is an important platform for children’s development of language and conversational skills and can form the basis for an approach to intervention for children with pragmatic difficulties. While most intervention studies have focused on reporting overall improvements in children’s language and conversational skills as a result of changes in caregiver behaviour, there is limited fine-grained understanding of children’s ability to achieve conversational topic contingency as a result of specific changes in their caregivers’ use of conversational topic turns and/or the facilitative techniques employed by therapists. The studies described in this thesis aim to address this limitation. The following questions are raised: (i) What is the impact of caregiver training intervention programmes on caregivers’ conversational topic turns and facilitative techniques? (ii) What is the impact of caregiver training intervention programmes on children’s conversational topic turns? and (iii) How do specific facilitative techniques impact children’s conversational skills? The first part of this thesis involves establishing the methodology for data transcription and data coding used in the four studies conducted for this thesis. Conversational recordings were transcribed using the CHAT format and conventions. Then a conversational coding system and a facilitative technique coding system were used to code the communicative acts transcribed. The conversational acts coded were topic change (TC), topic extension (TE), topic maintaining responses (TM), and non-relevant responses (NR). The facilitative techniques coded were imitation, expansion, follow-in questions, and follow-in cloze procedures. Inter-rater reliability levels of the transcription and coding of conversational acts and facilitative techniques were high. Study 1 (presented in Chapter 3) was designed to investigate changes following an ‘It Takes Two to Talk’ Hanen programme in the conversations of four caregiver-child dyads where the children had identified language delay. It employed a single subject design and the outcome measures were analysed in three phases: baseline, intervention and follow-up. The outcome measures were the rates of (i) caregivers’ conversational topic turns (i.e., TC, TE and TM), (ii) caregivers’ facilitative techniques (i.e., imitation, expansion, follow-in questions, and follow-in cloze procedures) and (iii) children’s conversational topic turns (i.e., TC, TE and TM). Results showed that all caregivers produced fewer TCs and higher rates of facilitative techniques, while all children produced significantly more TEs following intervention. Individual caregiver patterns of change appeared to be reflected in their children’s conversational skills. This study supports the effectiveness of caregiver group training programmes in improving the quality of caregiver-child conversations and highlighted the importance of investigating individual variations in intervention. Study 2 (presented in Chapter 4) was designed to investigate the changes in conversational skills of three children with features of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) following the dyads’ participation in caregiver-child individual training as part of a multidisciplinary programme for children with ASD. This study employed a case series design and the outcome measures were analysed in two phases (i.e., intervention and follow-up). Similar to Study 1, the outcome measures were rates of the (i) caregivers’ conversational topic turns (i.e., TC, TE and TM), (ii) caregivers’ facilitative techniques (i.e., imitation, expansion, follow-in questions, and follow-in cloze procedures) and (iii) children’s conversational topic turns (i.e., TC, TE and TM). Results of Study 2 showed that one of the three caregivers decreased the rates of TC, and one of them increased the rates of TM following intervention. The caregivers also increased their rates of facilitative techniques (i.e., imitation, expansion and follow-in questions). Concurrently, the children whose caregivers showed positive changes following intervention increased their rates of TCs and TMs. Consistent with the findings of Study 1, high individual variations were observed in the changes exhibited by the caregivers. Study 2 supports the effectiveness of individual training programmes in improving the quality of caregiver-child conversations and emphasizes the importance of investigating individual variations in intervention. Study 3 (presented in Chapter 5) was designed to investigate the qualitative changes made by a child from each of the first two studies. The two children presented with different language levels and aetiologies but both were receiving individualised programmes designed to enhance their conversational abilities. Taking a functional approach to communication development, Study 3 examined how each child (i) collaborated on an activity; (ii) expanded an activity; and (iii) returned to a previous activity or proposed a new activity, through conversational topic turns. Results suggest that the children learnt to collaborate on and expand activities through their caregivers’ repeated use of contingent topic turns (i.e., TM and TE) and facilitative techniques (i.e., expansion, follow-in questions and follow-in cloze procedures). However, they tended to return to a previous activity or propose a new activity when they did not attend to the preceding act or topic, seemed to not comprehend or were not interested in the preceding act or topic, or when their caregivers failed to attend to their preceding act or topic. These findings highlights that while caregivers’ topic turns that are contingent and facilitative help children to advance their activities, caregivers’ topic turns that are non-contingent have the potential to cause the children to end the preceding activity and switch to another activity. Study 4 was designed to compare the effectiveness of expansion, as a technique for facilitating children’s conversational topic turns, with expansion combined with other techniques when implemented by speech and language therapists (SLTs). Using a repeated measures design, this study aimed to compare the effects of expansion alone (EA); expansion combined with wh-questions (EQ); and expansion followed by a cloze procedure (EC) on the conversational skills of eight preschool children with conversational difficulties in conversation with their regular speech-language therapists (SLTs). Results showed that while there were no significant differences in child verbal topic maintaining responses across all techniques, EA elicited a significantly higher number of TEs, more non-verbal TMs and fewer NRs from the children, than either EQ or EC. The positive effects of each technique on the pragmatic appropriateness in conversations suggest that they could be used strategically in language intervention to enhance therapeutic effect. This thesis suggests that caregiver training programmes that focus on following the child’s lead and support caregivers and therapists to use contingent topic turns and facilitative techniques have positive outcomes for children’s conversational development. It also suggested that caregivers’ and therapists’ facilitative strategies that do not obligate responses from the child (i.e., expansion) have better potentials to help the child to expand the scope of conversations than strategies that obligate a response from the child (i.e., wh-questions and cloze procedures). Finally this thesis suggests that family-focussed intervention that follows the child’s lead appears likely to improve the conversational skills of children with a range of diagnoses by helping to address the common underlying features of conversational difficulties.

This dissertation examines decision making as discourse to capture subtle characteristics and processes within top management team discussions and examines their influence on decision outcomes. Additionally, this approach allows for exploration of decision making processes in real time by utilizing audio analysis techniques that can provide a more dynamic and integrative view of conversations and discussions as they relate to the dialogue and debate that goes on within top management teams, as well as providing an alternate pathway of study for top management team and group research, decision making studies, and the fields of communication and conversational analysis.

While significant progress has been made in automatic speech recognition (ASR) during the last few decades, recognizing and understanding unconstrained conversational speech remains a challenging problem. In this dissertation, five methods/systems are proposed towards a robust conversational speech recognition and understanding system. I. A non-uniform minimum classification error (MCE) approach is proposed which can achieve consistent and significant keyword spotting performance gains on both English and Mandarin large-scale spontaneous conversational speech tasks (Switchboard and HKUST Mandarin CTS). II. A hybrid recurrent DNN-HMM system is proposed for robust acoustic modeling and a new way of backpropagation through time (BPTT) is introduced. The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art performances on two benchmark datasets, the 2nd CHiME challenge (track 2) and Aurora-4, without front-end preprocessing, speaker adaptive training or multiple decoding passes. III. To study the specific case of conversational speech recognition in the presence of competing talkers, several multi-style training setups of DNNs are investigated and a joint decoder operating on multi-talker speech is introduced. The proposed combined system improves upon the previous state-of-the-art IBM superhuman system by 2.8% absolute on the 2006 speech separation challenge dataset. IV. Latent semantic rational kernels (LSRKs) are proposed for spotting the semantic notions on conversational speech. The proposed framework is generalized using tf-idf weighting, latent semantic analysis, WordNet, probabilistic topic models and neural network learned representations and is shown to achieve substantial topic spotting performance gains on two conversational speech tasks, Switchboard and AT&T HMIHY initial collection. V. Non-uniform sequential discriminative training (DT) of DNNs with LSRKs is proposed which directly links the information of the proposed LSRK framework to the objective function of the DT. The experimental results on the subset of Switchboard show the proposed method can lead the acoustic modeling to a more robust system with respect to the semantic decoder.

Thesis (M.A.T.) -- School for International Training, 2007. / Advisor -- Bonnie Mennell Includes bibliographical references (leaf 95).

Recent research in Interpreting Studies has favoured the argument that, in practice, the interpreter plays an active role, rather than the prescribed role stipulated in professional codes of conduct. Cutting-edge studies utilising multimodal research methods have taken a more comprehensive approach to investigating this argument, searching for evidence of the interpreter’s active involvement not only through textual analysis, but also by examining a range of non-verbal communicative means. Studies using multimodal analysis, such as those by Pasquandrea (2011) and Davitti (2012), have succeeded in offering new insights into the interpreter’s role in interaction. This research presents further investigation into the interpreter’s role through multimodal analysis by focusing on the use of gesture movements, gaze and body orientation in interpreter-mediated communication; it also looks at the impact of the state of knowledge asymmetry on the interpreter’s role. This thesis presents findings from six simulated face-to-face dialogue interpreting cases featuring three different groups of participants and interpreters representing different interpreting settings (e.g. parent-teacher meeting, business meeting, doctor-patient meeting, etc.). By adapting a multimodal approach, findings of this study (a) contribute to our understanding of the active role of the interpreter in Interpreting Studies by exploring new insights from a multimodal approach, and (b) offer new empirical findings from interpreter-mediated interactions to the technical analysis of multimodal communication.

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are intelligent software entities with an embodiment used to communicate with users, using natural language. Their purpose is to exhibit the same properties as humans in face-to-face conversation, including the ability to produce and respond to verbal and nonverbal communication. Researchers in the field of ECAs try to create agents that can be more natural, believable and easy to use. Designing an ECA requires understanding that manner, personality, emotion, and appearance are very important issues to be considered. In this thesis, we are interested in increasing believability of ECAs by placing personality at the heart of the human-agent verbal interaction. We propose a model relating personality facets and hidden communication goals that can influence ECA behaviors. Moreover, we apply our model in agents that interact in a puzzle game application. We develop five distinct personality oriented agents using an expressive communication language and a plan-based BDI approach for modeling and managing dialogue according to our proposed model. In summary, we present and test an innovative approach to model mental aspects of ECAs trying to increase their believability and to enhance human-agent affective communication. With this research, we hope to improve the understanding on how ECAs with expressive and affective characteristics can establish and maintain long-term human-agent relationships.

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are intelligent software entities with an embodiment used to communicate with users, using natural language. Their purpose is to exhibit the same properties as humans in face-to-face conversation, including the ability to produce and respond to verbal and nonverbal communication. Researchers in the field of ECAs try to create agents that can be more natural, believable and easy to use. Designing an ECA requires understanding that manner, personality, emotion, and appearance are very important issues to be considered. In this thesis, we are interested in increasing believability of ECAs by placing personality at the heart of the human-agent verbal interaction. We propose a model relating personality facets and hidden communication goals that can influence ECA behaviors. Moreover, we apply our model in agents that interact in a puzzle game application. We develop five distinct personality oriented agents using an expressive communication language and a plan-based BDI approach for modeling and managing dialogue according to our proposed model. In summary, we present and test an innovative approach to model mental aspects of ECAs trying to increase their believability and to enhance human-agent affective communication. With this research, we hope to improve the understanding on how ECAs with expressive and affective characteristics can establish and maintain long-term human-agent relationships.

nÃo hà / A presente tem como objetivo analisar os modos de organizaÃÃo de interaÃÃes verbais realizadas entre pesquisadores e estudantes universitÃrios, destacando-se as estratÃgias de polidez utilizadas pelos falantes cabo-verdianos e timorenses em entrevistas do PROFALA (entrevistas que seguem o modelo ALiB â Atlas LinguÃstico do Brasil). A anÃlise incidirà sobre 40 entrevistas do QuestionÃrio FonÃtico-FonolÃgico (QFF), estratificadas em procedÃncia (Cabo Verde/ Timor Leste), sexo (masculino e feminino) e tempo de permanÃncia no Brasil (mais de seis meses e menos de seis meses), aplicadas a estudantes de Cabo-Verde e Timor Leste dos cursos de graduaÃÃo da UFC e da UNILAB. Partimos do pressuposto de que a polidez possui carÃter multidisciplinar, pretendemos desenvolver a pesquisa com apoio de trÃs diferentes Ãreas do conhecimento: a PragmÃtica, a AnÃlise da ConversaÃÃo e a SociolinguÃstica interacional. Para isso, buscamos apoio na teoria de polidez defendida por Brown e Levinson (1987); Watts (2003); Leech (1983, 2005); nas produÃÃes de Goffman ([1967] 2011), numa visÃo das interaÃÃes, dos encontros, de Gumperz (1982), Phillips (1976), Marcuschi (2002), Castilho (2003) no que diz respeito à dinÃmica interacional das entrevistas-questionÃrios e à utilizaÃÃo de marcadores conversacionais linguÃsticos e nÃo linguÃsticos. A verificaÃÃo da funcionalidade dos marcadores à importante porque determina sua relaÃÃo com as estratÃgias de polidez selecionadas pelos falantes. A metodologia desenvolvida à de base qualiquantitativa, a quantificaÃÃo à apenas um parÃmetro usado para verificar as tendÃncias. O formato das entrevistas segue um padrÃo prÃ-estabelecido (QFF), no entanto, no seu desenvolvimento os entrevistadores deixam o papel de animadores e se tornam autores, criando uma nova dinÃmica de participaÃÃo que torna necessÃria a mudanÃa de alinhamento do entrevistado, sem perder de vista as estratÃgias de preservaÃÃo da imagem, assim como da polidez linguÃstica. A polidez foi usada como uma estratÃgia predominante nas interaÃÃes, percebemos que as mulheres mostraram uma preocupaÃÃo maior do que a dos homens com a preservaÃÃo de suas faces; enquanto que em relaÃÃo à procedÃncia, os cabo-verdianos parecem estar mais engajados e cooperativos do que os timorenses, o que pode sugerir maior polidez. Os estudantes de maior tempo de permanÃncia no Brasil mostraram-se mais engajados com a equipe de documentadores, parecendo existir maior polidez, abstraÃda da utilizaÃÃo dos marcadores conversacionais de atenuaÃÃo, de concordÃncia, do marcador âriso‟ e da busca de aprovaÃÃo. / This paper aims to analyze the organization of verbal interactions between researchers and university students, we focused in politeness strategies used by Cape Verdean and Timorese speakers interviews for PROFALA (the questionnaire-interviews follow the ALiB model â Linguistic Atlas from Brazil). The analysis concerns 40 interviews based on the phonetic-phonological questionnaire (PPQ), we divided in origin (Cape Verde/East Timor), gender (male/female), and residence time in Brazil (more than six months and less than six months). We assumed that politeness is multidisciplinary, consequently, we developed this research through the support of three different areas of knowledge: Pragmatics, Conversation Analysis, and Interactional Sociolinguistics. In addition, we used the politeness concept proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987); Watts (2003); Leech (1983, 2005); and Goffman ([1967] 2011); we based the interaction in meeting concept, concerning the interactional dynamics of questionnaire-interviews and the use of linguistic and non-linguistic conversational markers, in Gumperz (1982), Phillips (1976), Marcuschi (2002) and Castilho (2003). It is important to check the functionality of the conversational markers to determine its relation with the politeness strategies used by the speakers. The methodology adopted is quali-quantitative; quantification was used as a parameter to verify trends, without the pretension of being undeniable. The questionnaires and interviews layout follow a pattern (QFF); however, during its development the interviewers assume the role of authors instead of entertainers, creating a new dynamic of participation for the interviewee without losing image preservation strategies and linguistic politeness. Politeness was used as the main strategy during the interaction; we noticed that women were more concerned about face work than men were; concerning the origin, Cape Verdeans were more engaged and collaborative than Timorese people, which suggests more politeness. The students with more residence time in Brazil were more engaged with the documentation team, their relationship seems to be more polite, but with lower use of attenuation marker, agreement marker, âlaughâ marker and the pursuit of approval.

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are intelligent software entities with an embodiment used to communicate with users, using natural language. Their purpose is to exhibit the same properties as humans in face-to-face conversation, including the ability to produce and respond to verbal and nonverbal communication. Researchers in the field of ECAs try to create agents that can be more natural, believable and easy to use. Designing an ECA requires understanding that manner, personality, emotion, and appearance are very important issues to be considered. In this thesis, we are interested in increasing believability of ECAs by placing personality at the heart of the human-agent verbal interaction. We propose a model relating personality facets and hidden communication goals that can influence ECA behaviors. Moreover, we apply our model in agents that interact in a puzzle game application. We develop five distinct personality oriented agents using an expressive communication language and a plan-based BDI approach for modeling and managing dialogue according to our proposed model. In summary, we present and test an innovative approach to model mental aspects of ECAs trying to increase their believability and to enhance human-agent affective communication. With this research, we hope to improve the understanding on how ECAs with expressive and affective characteristics can establish and maintain long-term human-agent relationships.

Entende-se por gramaticalização a passagem de um item lexical para um item gramatical, ou de um menos gramatical para um mais gramatical. Vinculando este trabalho ao arcabouço teórico da Gramaticalização numa abordagem funcionalista, discutimos a mudança lingüística empreendida pelo verbo esperar até alcançar seu padrão funcional de marcador conversacional sob forma da expressão espera aí. Como ponto de partida, elegemos uma amostra do falar culto paulista a partir de materiais provenientes do acervo CAPH (Centro de Apoio à Pesquisa em História FFLCH-USP), da midiateca do IEA (Instituto de Estudos Avançados-USP) e de entrevistas já organizadas pela equipe do Projeto NURC/SP (Projeto Norma Urbana Culta de São Paulo). Evidenciamos o papel discursivo do interlocutor como gatilho para a emergência do padrão funcional mais inovador. Esta dissertação vincula-se ao Grupo de Pesquisa Mudança Gramatical do Português Gramaticalização (CNPq-USP). / It is assumed that grammaticalization is the passage from a lexical to a grammatical item or from a less grammatical to a more grammatical one. We link this research to a theoretical framework of the Grammaticalization in a functionalist approach, we also argue about the linguistic change undertaken by the verb esperar (wait) until it reaches its functional standard of a conversational marker that is formed by the expression espera aí. A starting point, we elect a sample of the Paulistas (from São Paulo) standard spoken language material proceeding from the CAPH (Center of Support to the Research in History - FFLCH-USP), from the midia-library of the IEA (Institute of Advanced Studies) and the Project NURC/SP (Project Cultured Urban Norm of São Paulo) organized interviews. We evidence the discursive role of the interlocutor as the trigger for the rising of the more innovative functional standard. This dissertation is linked to the Group to Research Portuguese Grammatical Change - Grammaticalization (CNPq-USP).