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Research endeavors on spoken dialogue systems in the 1990s and 2000s have led to the deployment of commercial spoken dialogue systems (SDS) in microdomains such as customer service automation, reservation/booking and question answering systems. Recent research in SDS has been focused on the development of applications in different domains (e.g. virtual counseling, personal coaches, social companions) which requires more sophistication than the previous generation of commercial SDS. The focus of this research project is the delivery of behavior change interventions based on the brief intervention counseling style via spoken dialogue systems. Brief interventions (BI) are evidence-based, short, well structured, one-on-one counseling sessions. Many challenges are involved in delivering BIs to people in need, such as finding the time to administer them in busy doctors' offices, obtaining the extra training that helps staff become comfortable providing these interventions, and managing the cost of delivering the interventions. Fortunately, recent developments in spoken dialogue systems make the development of systems that can deliver brief interventions possible. The overall objective of this research is to develop a data-driven, adaptable dialogue system for brief interventions for problematic drinking behavior, based on reinforcement learning methods. The implications of this research project includes, but are not limited to, assessing the feasibility of delivering structured brief health interventions with a data-driven spoken dialogue system. Furthermore, while the experimental system focuses on harmful alcohol drinking as a target behavior in this project, the produced knowledge and experience may also lead to implementation of similarly structured health interventions and assessments other than the alcohol domain (e.g. obesity, drug use, lack of exercise), using statistical machine learning approaches. In addition to designing a dialog system, the semantic and emotional meanings of user utterances have high impact on interaction. To perform domain specific reasoning and recognize concepts in user utterances, a named-entity recognizer and an ontology are designed and evaluated. To understand affective information conveyed through text, lexicons and sentiment analysis module are developed and tested.

Ottawa’s Capital Slam poetry scene has transformed over the past decade, marking a shift in the identities, discourses and performance styles of local poets. This thesis investigates these changes and trends within the time periods of 2008-2010 and 2012- 2014. This thesis demonstrates the shift from male poets of colour in 2008-2010 to female voices in 2012-2014 at Capital Slam, through an examination of Ottawa’s history and a multimodal critical discourse analysis of online performances. In particular, the creation of local alternative poetry shows over the past five years has increased the representation of female poets and transformed the racial dynamics of the scene. During the period 2008-2010 and 2012-2014, poets used key historical elements of slam poetry such as storytelling and speaking through personal experiences to effectively demonstrate how marginalized individuals can speak counter-narratives to dominant culture. The use of storytelling allowed these poets to engage, connect and dialogue with the audience, as well as demonstrate their different identities, discourses and performance styles.

Spoken Word poetry in South Africa is understood as a genre of poetry which encompasses elements of textuality, musicality and performance, and is currently produced and frequented predominantly by a young, black public, according to Molebatsi and D’Abdon (2007). By means of ethnography, content analysis, and interviews with thirteen poets, this study demonstrates that the genre is used for expressing the life experiences of artists and their communities (Sole, 2008), as well as narrating social ills and concerns, including political, religious and other social experiences. In this sense, it is argued that Spoken Word may be termed as being a contemporary form of liberation politics (Judge, 1993) that is employed to serve a social function beyond directly political aims. This is made visible through the narratives, styles and identifications that distinguish members of this movement. This study provides a description of the scene in Pretoria and Johannesburg, drawing out various features of the movement. The social and political significance of the movement is presented by emphasising the poets’ perspectives on the Spoken Word movement, and engaging in a thematic content analysis of poems under the themes race and politics, gender and sexuality, and religion. International literature is engaged to demonstrate differences and similarities between South Africa’s Spoken Word scene and that of the USA by consulting works of scholars such as Weber (1999), Bruce & Davis (2000) and Hoffman (2001). It is demonstrated that similar to the genre in the USA, South African Spoken Word stresses performance to be an important distinguisher of this type of poetry. Also, in both contexts this art form has links to identity politics of previously marginalized groups. The study presents a similar finding to D’Abdon’s (2014) argument that the narratives presented in the post-apartheid Spoken Word movement greatly reflect Black Consciousness ideology, yet also importantly stresses that the movement also presents discontinuities with this discourse, allowing for a much broader array of narrative to permeate the performance poetry scene. This study makes an additional contribution to the existing literature through its key findings. Firstly, the study argues that although there has been a significant increase of women into the scene, Spoken Word remains a gendered space. Secondly, this study demonstrates that narratives produced by this movement contribute to experiences of community, but also play an exclusionary role to certain groups. Finally, the study illustrates that poets of the present day Spoken Word scene have begun a move towards commercialisation of the art form, subsequently also aiming for the valuation of African literature. In essence, it is argued that the present day Spoken Word poetry movement has great social and cultural value, and presents great potential of being a vehicle through which political and social consciousness can be both created and sustained. Key words: Spoken Word, poetry, South Africa, oral literature, slam, open mic, post-apartheid, literature, narratives, Black Consciousness, politics, social change, art, liberation poetry, liberation politics, culture, hip-hop, conscious art, resistant political art / Dissertation (MSocSci)--University of Pretoria, 2015. / Sociology / Unrestricted

Die Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit syntaktischen Strukturen des gesprochenen Gegenwartsdeutschen. Ausgehend von einem Korpus von spontaner Sprache, u.a. aus Talkshows und Reality-TV-Sendungen, wird Videomaterial aus Lehrwerken für Deutsch als Fremdsprache auf gesprochensprachliche syntaktische Strukturen hin analysiert. Es soll der Frage nachgegangen werden, inwieweit Unterrichtsmaterialien die Sprachwirklichkeit angemessen widerspiegeln.:1. Einleitung ........................................................................................................................... 3 2. Grundlegende Begrifflichkeiten ......................................................................................... 5 2.1. Der Norm-Begriff ............................................................................................................ 6 2.2. Gesprochenes Standarddeutsch ....................................................................................... 8 3. Forschungsstand ............................................................................................................... 11 3.1. Gesprochene und geschriebene Sprache ....................................................................... 13 3.2. Grundlegende Merkmale von gesprochener Sprache .................................................... 14 3.3. Behandlung gesprochener Sprache in grammatischen Referenzwerken ....................... 15 3.4. Untersuchungen gesprochener Sprache in Deutsch-als-Fremdsprache-Lehrmaterial... 17 4. Analysekategorien syntaktischer Strukturen gesprochener Sprache ................................ 19 4.1. Referenz-Aussage-Struktur ........................................................................................... 20 4.2. Apokoinu-Konstruktion ................................................................................................ 22 4.3. Operator-Skopus-Strukturen ......................................................................................... 23 4.4. Abhängige Verbzweitkonstruktion ............................................................................... 25 4.5. Ursprüngliche Subjunktion mit Verbzweitstellung: weil .............................................. 27 4.6. Uneigentliche Verbspitzenstellung ............................................................................... 29 4.7. Expansion ...................................................................................................................... 31 4.8. Anakoluthe .................................................................................................................... 32 4.9. Pronominaladverb in Distanzstellung ........................................................................... 34 5. Gesprochene Sprache und Deutsch als Fremdsprache ..................................................... 37 6. Selbsterstelltes Korpus zu syntaktischen Strukturen gesprochener Sprache.................... 40 6.1. Erläuterung zur Korpuszusammenstellung ................................................................... 41 6.2. Überblick und Kommentierung einiger Korpusdaten ................................................... 42 7. Analyse des Videomaterials aus Lehrwerken für Deutsch als Fremdsprache .................. 52 7.1. Erläuterung zu den Lehrwerken .................................................................................... 52 7.2. Überblick und Kommentierung einiger Analyseergebnisse .......................................... 56 8. Ausblick: Anwendung im Deutsch-als-Fremdsprache-Unterricht ................................... 63 Literaturverzeichnis .............................................................................................................. 65 Anhang ................................................................................................................................. 70 Anhang I: Selbsterstelltes Korpus zu syntaktischen Strukturen gesprochener Sprache ...... 70 Anhang II: Analyse des Videomaterials aus Lehrwerken für Deutsch als Fremdsprache . 119

The aim of the thesis is to propose a tagging system for a learner corpus of spoken English which would, apart from tagging errors, focus also on the features specific for spoken language. Theoretical part, therefore, introduces basic concepts including learner language, the development of learner corpora in the last 20 years and both classical and computer-aided error analysis. Features typical of spoken language are described in the theoretical part as well since these are the focus of the research part of the thesis. The Louvain tagging system used for error-tagging of a leaner corpus of written language is used as the basis for the tagging system proposed in this thesis. Based on the analysis of 20 transcriptions taken from the Czech part of spoken learner corpus LINDSEI, modifications of the categories taken from the Louvain error-tagging system are proposed and new categories necessary for a better description of spoken language are introduced. The tagging system proposed in this thesis should make further analysis of the tagged corpus easier.

The thesis analyses syntactic complexity of monologic tasks of 10 B2 and 10 C1 speakers of English with Czech as their L1. The data derives from LINDSEI_CZ (Gráf 2017). The transcripts of the recordings were segmented into AS-units (Foster et al. 2000) and adapted for the purposes of the analysis. Syntactic complexity was calculated using following measures: mean length of AS-unit, mean length of clause, clauses / AS-unit. These were complemented by fine-grained indices of structural complexity, comprised of ratios of subordinate clause types and coordinate verb phrases per total number of clauses (Vercellotti & Packer 2016) and a weighted complexity scale designed by Vercellotti (2018). The results of the quantitative analysis showed no significant effect of proficiency on syntactic complexity of the speakers. In fact, all speakers irrespective of language proficiency level produced very similar complex structures as opposed to lower-proficiency structures. This indicates that more fine-grained indices should be incorporated into spoken complexity research. At the same time, scores of each measure varied considerably within groups, pointing at the importance of inter-speaker variability in this research. The thesis thus produced outcomes that are largely methodological, in that it has identified...

Les enfants et adolescents dysphasiques présentent un trouble spécifique du langage qui se manifeste, en absence d'un déficit cognitif, sous la forme d'une perturbation profonde à l'oral et qui persiste au-delà de l'âge de 6 ans. Basée sur des éléments de psychologie pragmatique développementale (principe de coopération de Grice, 1979, et passage de la phase inter-psychologique à la phase intra-psychologique de Vygotski, 1997), et inspirée des travaux de Berman (2005), cette thèse défend l'idée que dans la dysphasie le langage n'est pas uniformément déficitaire. En d'autres termes, les performances langagières des enfants et des adolescents dysphasiques devraient varier en fonction de la situation de production dans laquelle ils se trouvent (tache standardisée vs. tache communicative), mais aussi en fonction de la modalité de production (oral vs. écrit), et enfin de l'indice linguistiques considéré (e.g. orthographe lexicale vs. orthographe morphologique). Les résultats obtenus montrent que les dysphasiques ont de meilleures performances langagières en situation de communication qu'en situation standardisée, que leurs performances en situation communicative sont meilleures à l'écrit qu'à l'oral, et enfin que le profil développemental de leurs capacités langagières évolue différemment, entre 7-11 ans et 12-18 ans, selon l'indice linguistique considéré. La psychologie pragmatique développementale permet donc de souligner que, dans le cadre de l'évaluation des capacités langagières des enfants et des adolescents dysphasiques, le choix des tâches influence les performances obtenues. De plus, comme le préconisait Ringard (2000), les enfants et adolescents dysphasiques bénéficient pleinement d'une scolarisation en milieu ordinaire et y progressent sur le long terme. / Children and adolescents with a specific language impairment (SLI) present a language disorder that appears in the absence of a cognitive impairment and persists beyond the age of 6. Based on elements of developmental pragmatics (Grice cooperative principle, 1979 and transition from the interpsychological to intrapsychological functioning, Vygotsky, 1997) and inspired by the work of Berman (2005), this thesis defends the idea that in SLI the language is not a uniform deficit. In other words, the language performances of children and adolescents with SLI should vary according to the situation in which they produce language (standardized test vs. communicative situation), but also according to the production modality (oral vs. written), and finally the linguistic measure considered (e.g. morphological spelling vs. lexical spelling). The results show that the participants with SLI perform better in a communicative than in a standardised test situation, and in written than in spoken language. Finally, their performance varies differently according to the measure considered, from 7 to 11 and 12 to 18. The developmental pragmatics framework chosen made it possible to emphasize that, when assessing language abilities in children and adolescents with SLI, the choice of a task affects the performance obtained. Moreover, as advocated by Ringard (2000), children and adolescents with SLI fully benefit from a mainstream school environment, where they can progress in the long term, up to the age of 18.

The subject of this thesis is orality in informal dialogic computer-mediated communication (henceforth CMC). This type of communication is represented by internet discussions, discussion fora, and Facebook posts. All these three genres are compared with informal spoken face-to-face dialogues. The data are covered by the Koditex corpus, which contains the CMC genres, and the Ortofon corpus of spoken language. The term orality can refer both to the realized communication form - spoken or written (so- called media orality) and to the summary of linguistic characteristics associated with the prototypical informal spoken dialogue (so-called conceptual orality). This thesis focuses only on conceptual orality, which is based on nine language features divided into the three following areas: dialogicity, spontaneity, and fulfilment of pragmatic needs of communication participants. The analyses show significant similarity between the functional use of features in both spoken and written communication. This applies primarily to the features associated with spontaneity (repetition of the same words, the presence of word fragments, typos and misspellings) and the fulfilment of pragmatic needs (discourse markers, pronoun non-dropping, iteration of graphemes). It follows that the selected CMC genres appropriately...

This thesis aims to investigate the eect context could have to interaction between a user and a spoken dialogue system. It was assumed that using context-dependent voice commands instead of absolute semantic voice commands would make the dialogue more natural and also increase the usability. This thesis also investigate if introducing context could aect the user's privacy and if it could expose a threat for the user from a user perspective. Based on an extended literature review of spoken dialogue system, voice recognition, ambient intelligence, human-computer interaction and privacy, a spoken dialogue system was designed and implemented to test the assumption. The test study included two steps: experiment and interview. The participants conducted the dierent scenarios where a spoken dialogue system could be used with both context-dependent commands and absolute semantic commands. Based on these studies, qualitative results regarding natural, usability and privacy validated the authors hypothesis to some extent. The results indicated that the interaction between users and spoken dialogue systems was more natural and increased the usability when using context. The participants did not feel more monitored by the spoken dialogue system when using context. Some participants stated that there could be a theoretical privacy issues, but only if the security measurements were not met. The paper concludes with suggestions for future work in the scientic area. / Denna uppsats har som mal att undersoka vilken eekt kontext kan ha pa interaktion mellan en anvandare och ett spoken dialogue system. Det antogs att anvandbarheten skulle oka genom att anvanda kontextberoende rostkommandon istallet for absolut semantiska rostkommandon. Denna uppsats granskar aven om kontext kan paverka anvandarens integritet och om den, ur ett anvandarperspektiv, kan utgora ett hot. Baserat pa den utokade litteraturstudien av spoken dialogue system, rostigenkanning, ambient intelligence, manniska-datorinteraktion och integritet, designades och implementerades ett spoken dialogue system for att testa detta antagande. Teststudien bestod av tva steg: experiment och intervju. Deltagarna utforde olika scenarier dar ett spoken dialogue system kunde anvands med kontextberoende rostkommandon och absolut semantiska rostkommandon. Kvalitativa resultat angaende naturlighet, anvandbarhet och integritet validerade forfattarens hypotes till en viss grad. Resultatet indikerade att interaktionen mellan anvandare och ett spoken dialogue system var mer naturlig och mer anvandbar vid anvandning av kontextberoende rostkommandon istallet for absolut semantiska rostkommandon. Deltagarna kande sig inte mer overvakade av ett spoken dialogue system vid anvandning av kontextberoende rostkommandon. Somliga deltagare angav att det, i teorin, fanns integritetsproblem, men endast om inte alla sakerhetsatgarder var uppnadda. Uppsatsen avslutas med forslag pa framtida studier inom detta vetenskapliga omrade.