Casual Chat Research Articles

Discourse markers in small talk and tasks

Discourse markers help people navigate conversations. We tested how the use of five discourse markers – so, but, oh, I think, and like – was influenced by communication medium (text, phone, videoconferencing) and conversation type (task-related conversation or small talk). Additionally, we tested whether these discourse markers influenced the amount of words contributed throughout the conversation and how interlocutors felt about their conversations. These discourse markers were used more while working on a task compared to casual chat during a phone conversation, but less while working on a task compared to casual chat during instant messaging and videoconferencing conversations. We observed no relationships between discourse marker use and the amount participants contributed to their conversations, nor did we observe relationships between discourse marker use and conversational appraisals in the phone or videoconferencing conversations. We observed a trending relationship in instant messaging conversations where the more discourse markers used, the more communicators enjoyed their conversations. The work presented here expands understanding of discourse markers by documenting variation by setting and task type. The findings support the argument that discourse markers are used to negotiate conversations.

Intelligent Customer Service System Optimization Based on Artificial Intelligence

To elevate the intelligence of customer service dialogue systems, this article proposes an intelligent customer service system comprising chat dialogue subsystems, task-oriented multi-turn dialogue subsystems, single-turn dialogue subsystems, and an integration model. Firstly, to enhance diversity of responses and improve user experience, particularly in casual chat scenarios, this article presents a Seq2Seq-based approach for multi-answer responses, allowing for more expressive emotional expression in responses. Secondly, to address situations where customers cannot articulate their needs in a single sentence during multi-turn dialogues, this article designs a task-oriented multi-turn dialogue module. It employs intent recognition and slot filling to maintain contextual information throughout the conversation, aiding customers in problem resolution. Lastly, to overcome the current limitation of intelligent customer service models providing relatively one-dimensional answers in specific domains.

Geographies of COVID‐19

Geographies of COVID‐19

INTERAKSI SOSIAL DALAM MEMBANGUN CITRA SUPORTER THE JAKMANIA KARAWANG

This research is used to explore the pattern of social interaction in building the image of the group of supporters of The Jakmania Karawang. Over time, The Jakmania Karawang has obstacles and a negative image as a form of unity by The Jakmania Karawang. The research is a case study approach and method. Sources of data using data collection techniques are descriptive observation, structured interviews, documentation in the form of pictures. The subject of this research is the regional coordinator and member of the field coordinator of The Jakmania Karawang. The data analysis technique uses the Miles and Huberman model whose contents are data collection, data reduction, data presentation, and conclusions. This study uses the Interaction Analysis Theory proposed by Aubrey Fisher, Leonard Hawes. This theory discusses the interaction process in which a person gives suggestions, feedback, and expects responses from group members. The results of the research found are patterns of social interaction that occur in the form of social contact in the form of social media, discussions, and casual chat. Communication that is formed is verbal communication, two-way and results in direct communication, and group communication. The forms of associative social interaction in the form of kinship, cooperation, embracing, mutual cooperation, and solidarity form conciliation and tolerance, forms of dissociative social interaction in the form of individual and intergroup conflicts and conflicts produce culture. Barriers to patterns of social interaction because they have a distinctive language are different, the driving factor that hinders due to conflict in fanaticism.Kata Kunci: Pola interaksi sosial, kelompok, citra.

Association Between Time Spent With Family and Loneliness Among Japanese Workers During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cross-Sectional Study.

Background: The current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has had large impacts on society, including people practicing social distancing. This behavioral response has increased loneliness. Loneliness not only increases the risk of psychiatric disorders, but also affects occupational mental health. To avoid the negative effects of isolation, it is important to have social contact with other people, especially family members. Employment and economic instability caused by COVID-19 may have also affected family relationships. It is important to understand the association between family relationships and loneliness in workers under the pandemic.Methods: We collected usable data from 27,036 Japanese workers who completed an online survey during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants were asked how long they spend with members of their family during mealtimes or at home, and if they experienced loneliness; the latter was assessed by a single question. Other questions included whether participants lived with their spouse, or with someone in need of care. To estimate the odds ratios (ORs) of time with family associated with loneliness we used a multilevel logistic model nested in the prefecture of residence, with adjustments for age, sex, marital status, presence of a cohabitant requiring care, equivalent income, educational level, number of employees in the workplace, frequency of remote work, availability of someone for casual chat, smoking, drinking, time for leisure interests, and cumulative rates of COVID-19 in the prefecture.Results: Ten percent (2,750) of the 27,036 participants reported loneliness. The survey showed a significant negative correlation between time spent with family and loneliness (p < ‘0.001): participants who spent more time with family were less likely to feel loneliness. In addition, not living with a spouse and living with someone in need of care were associated with loneliness (not living with a spouse: p < 0.001; living with someone in need of care: p < 0.001).Conclusion: Loneliness under COVID-19 pandemic conditions was negatively associated with time spent with family members, with the converse result found for participants cohabiting with someone in need of care. These associations suggest the potential value of changes to working practices and interventions to combat loneliness.

The Strategies of English Lecturers’ in Teaching Speaking

One of the responsibilities a lecturer should concern while teaching the students is to create a communicative environment, instead of worrying about the process of teaching and put no regard on the students’ language ability. This research aimed to find out the kinds of strategy in teaching speaking of English Education Study Program and to know the application of those strategies in the classroom. The research designed in this study was a descriptive qualitative to describe the status of things in the present or in the past. It meant that the data gathered were not analyzed in term of number statistical accounting but were analyzed in the qualitative form which is more than more numbers or frequencies. Based on the research findings, it can be concluded that the most lecturers’ teaching strategy that used in teaching speaking are using recording &amp; transcripts, dialogues, discussion, classroom conversation, and casual chat. Lecturers’ used that technique because it is based on the handbook and it is easy to practice. Some other strategy sometimes used by lecturers’, but the frequency is very rare. The most used are dialogues and conversation and chat and jokes. Based on the discussion, most students like the strategy that used by the teacher. They followed lecturers’ instruction.

The inheritance of values in Sundanese song of Cianjuran in West Java

&lt;p&gt;This article examines the issue of inheritance that occurs in the Sundanese Song of Cianjuran. During this time, the inheritance is dominated by the transfer of skills only, while the transfer of value tends to be ignored. Consequently, the public cannot grasp the value of what is important to Sundanese Song of Cianjuran, so that over time the Sundanese Song of Cianjuran being abandoned. Through research conducted by observation into the studio and the training venues of Sundanese Song of Cianjuran, and interviews with the artists of Sundanese Song of Cianjuran, the study results showed two things. First, the Sundanese Song of Cianjuran contains the value both in lyrics and music accompaniment, in the lyrics have meaning is quite diverse, whereas the musical accompaniment contains any value in the form of symbolic treatment. Second, the process of inheritance value, on the one hand, occurs at certain times through a casual chat after training Sundanese Song of Cianjuran finished, and on the other hand, the value of inheritance is one drawback in the regeneration of Sunda Cianjuran song, because teachers tend to pass on the skills aspect alone.&lt;/p&gt;

Embroidered Palestine: A Stitched Narrative

IntroductionIn studying folk creativity, unexpected day-to-day encounters sometime point the way to new research projects, while the emotions relating to such discoveries can become indispensable as analytical resources. Such was the case when during a casual chat at a sports center I happened to mention a research project in which I was involved, focusing on needlepoint embroidery (Salamon). Upon hearing the topic of my research, the man sitting next to me dismissed this kind of embroidery, only to go on to enthusiastically describe an embroidered wall hanging he recently came across in a Palestinian home in one of East Jerusalem's refugee neighborhoods.1My interlocutor, an Israeli man in his seventies, was impressed by the wall hanging's aesthetic style as well as, to use his own phrase, by surprising, even daring theme: an embroidered picture, composed entirely of Arabic written names of pre-1948 Palestinian villages in Jerusalem and its surroundings, which now formed part of the State of Israel.2 When he asked whether the piece was for sale, the owner answered that this piece, embroidered by his wife, will never be sold. It is priceless (see figure 1).Living in Jerusalem, I was familiar with a wide and varied range of Palestinian embroidery: dresses, pillows, handbags, and even wall hangings, mainly preserving traditional patterns (as seen in figures 2 and 3). Yet it seemed to me that this vivid story was describing an object that lay at the intersection between the craft of embroidery, memories of a lost patrimony, and the uncompromising declaration of ownership-all wrapped up with intense emotions. Naturally, this provoked my curiosity. Asking Palestinian friends about this form of embroidery, I learned they were all familiar with it and, in addition, were not surprised to hear that non-Palestinians rarely got a glimpse of this type of handicraft. Moreover, they introduced me to an even more explicit design-that of an embroidered map of Palestine, called Tatriz khartat Falastin (?^k^ie jjjki), Embroidered Palestine Maps, made to be framed and hung on the walls of Palestinian homes.3Embroidered Palestine Maps are a loaded spectacle. The needlework is colorful and large, describing the borders of pre-1948 British-Mandate Palestine; place names and images are located in their respective geographic locations. The names of towns and cities of Palestine of that era are stitched in Arabic letters and pictorial images, while non-Palestinian towns and cities are ignored (as may be seen in figures 4 to 14).The discovery of this embroidery style enabled me to inquire into its stitched narrative and the sentiments associated with it. This article explores the voice arising out of this style of embroidered narrative and approaches the source of its distinctive potency. The research project on which this article is based focused on these embroidered maps from the Palestinian embroiderer's point of view. At the basis of this project was fieldwork conducted during 2010 and 2011 in Jerusalem and its vicinity both within the West Bank barrier and outside of it. The research was carried out with the assistance of two female Palestinian students and included the documentation of the embroidered maps together with accompanying in-depth interviews. The interviewees were asked to recount the path that brought them to embroider the maps, and the emotions that were associated with the act of their creation throughout the process.As this article will go on to demonstrate, the painful past and the conflicted reality in which these maps are embroidered and displayed is overburdened with competing narratives that seek to defeat and silence each other. The embroidered narrative operates within the multinarrative sounding board of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The land narrated by Embroidered Palestine, as I choose to name these maps, is the very same land discussed over and over in other narratives, from printed maps to the mainly verbally articulated forms of the different sides. …

Creating a new iconicity: an interview with Catherine Opie

A few days ago I got in touch with Regen Projects, gallery and agent of the famous California-based photographer, Catherine Opie, in order to obtain an interview with her. A long and rather casual chat ensued: Juliette Melia: I’d like to start with apologies for having first tried to contact you directly via Facebook, I realize now it was not really appropriate. Is it a sign of the times, that the boundaries between public and private are more blurred than before, is it the idea behind your s...

The Circle Closed: A Psychological Reading of The Glass Menagerie and The Two Character Play

The Circle Closed: A Psychological Reading of The Glass Menagerie and The Two Character Play R.B. PARKER "He thought he could create his own circle of light." III the Bar ofa Tokyo Hotel On February 25, 1983, I was correcting galley proofs of a Twentieth Century Interpretations volume on The Glass Menagerie when it was announced over the radio that Tennessee Williams had died in a New York hotel, bizarrely choking on a plastic bottle-top while under the influence of barbiturates.I A spate of eulogies followed. Walter Kerr called him "the greatest American playwright. Period."; and Marlon Brando affirmed more personally that Tennessee Williams "was a very brave man ... he never lied or flunked. He told the truth as best he perceived it, and never turned away from things that beset or frightened him.,,2 I sadly added a last item to the chronology at the back of my anthology. I had been asked to edit that collection ofessays because, in casual chat with the general editor, I said it seemed to me perverse to reduce the heavy theatricalism of The Glass Menagerie, as most productions do, and particularly wrong to dismiss its film projections as awkward, pretentious, and jejune - as even sympathetic critics like Lester A. Beaurline and Gerald Debusscher had recently maintained.3 There are two distinct versions of The Glass Menagerie in print. The Dramatists Play Service's "acting edition" is based on the version actually staged by Eddie Dowling in 1945 (and still preferred for most productions). This has no projections or mimed action, and the text shows considerable rewording, especially in the Amanda speeches and in Tom's "framework" speeches (that is, those speeches in which Tom-remembering introduces and 518 R.B. PARKER comments on the play directly to the audience). The other version, known as the "reading edition," published originally by Random House and currently by New Directions, is the one that Williams, having bowed to Dowling's pressure for changes in the performance text, nevertheless insisted be printed and has enshrined in his Collected Theatre. This does have the projections; much ofthe play's early business must be mimed (for example, in scene one, the family is directed to mime eating with non-existent knives, forks and food); and the wording is much more complex and ironically ambivalent than in the acting text. In particular, there is acertain self-conscious, overelaborate "poeticizing" quality in Tom's framework speeches, particularly at the end, which produces what is perhaps one of Williams's most characteristic effects as a theatre artist, the effect of self-conscious symbolism (let us call it) which can be seen at its fullest development in Camino Real, and which is also integral to the peculiar "Memory Play" effect he was pioneering in The Glass Menagerie, a point that will be returned to later. To research background for the anthology, I visited the University of Texas at Austin-in order to examine the big Williams archive that had recently been deposited in the Humanities Research Center there, only to be appalled at th~ sheer amount of material that confronted me. Williams was a compulsive writer: he spent four or five hours at his typewriter every morning, no matter where he was, partly as therapy but also as the one consistency in his otherwise anarchic life; and he was a compulsive rewriter, who explained to one of his interviewers: Finishing a play, you know, is like completing a marriage or a love affair.... You feel very forsaken by that, that's why I love reviSing and reviSing, because it delays the moment when there is this separation between you and the work.4 He was apt to put the same material through many different forms: poem, short story, one-act play, full-length play (rewritten several times), novel, and film or television script; and he claimed that no work could be considered fixed until he has stopped working on it. Three years ago, the Texas material was only roughly sorted out by title; and, to compound confusion, in revising Williams had the habit of mixing altered pages with pages from earlier drafts that needed no change. There is thus...