Dialogue Understanding Research Articles

In Memoriam: Brother Wayne Teasdale

In Memoriam:Brother Wayne Teasdale Jennifer Harris On 20 October 2004, Wayne Teasdale died at age 59. After his second battle with cancer, he passed on, leaving numerous friends, loved ones, and students. Wayne was a world-renowned spiritual teacher and scholar who worked tirelessly to create dialogue and understanding among the world's religions. Wayne was the leading voice in the Christian contemplative movement. In particular, Wayne Teasdale met often with His Holiness the Dalai Lama to discuss their faiths. In his own words, "I am convinced that Christianity and Buddhism together have a unique opportunity and responsibility to enter into a sustained dialogue on all matters. . . . If the two traditions work together on resolving the critical issues facing the planet, and if they commit themselves to an open-ended dialogue process in which mutual influence on each other occurs in the areas of belief or view, prayer, and social engagement, they will make an enormously precious contribution towards the communication of a new consciousness all around the world." For more than ten years, Brother Wayne Teasdale studied, prayed, and meditated in the seclusion of Hundred Acres Monastery in New Hampshire. In 1986, Father Bede Griffiths, an English Benedictine monk living in India, invited Wayne to his ashram to take sannyasa (Indian monkhood) from him as a Christian. Sannyasa formally means to renounce the world. This event began Wayne's work as an interreligious monk and mystic. Through his writings, Wayne has helped thousands of individuals to understand their own true paths and explored the idea of renunciation and spirituality in daily life. Wayne Teasdale served on the board of trustees of the Parliament of the World's Religions and was the coordinator of the Bede Griffiths International Trust. Wayne dedicated himself to helping people discover their true spiritual nature and was a passionate activist who worked throughout his life to create dialogue and mutual understanding among the world's religions. He is the author of many seminal books, most notably The Mystic Heart: Discovering a Universal Spirituality in the World's Religions and A Monk in the World: Cultivating a Spiritual Life. His other books include Catholicism in Dialogue: Conversations Across Traditions; Come and Sit: A Week Inside Meditation Centers; Hermitage of the Heart: Contemplative Practices from Hundred Acres Monastery; Community of Religions: Voices and Images of the Parliament of the World's Religions; Essays in Mysticism; Yoga of Sound: Healing and Enlightenment through the Sacred Practice of Mantra (with Russill Paul); Bede Griffiths: An Introduction to His Interspiritual Thought (with Bede Griffiths); Awakening the Spirit, Inspiring the Soul: 30 Stories of Interspiritual Discovery in the Community of Faiths (with Martha Howard, MD), and Mystic Hours: A Daybook of Inspirational Wisdom and Devotion. [End Page 163] Wayne was the leader of the Interfaith Call for Freedom of Worship and Human Rights in Tibet. He was a member of the Monastic Interreligous Dialogue and helped draft their Universal Declaration on Nonviolence. He was an adjunct professor at DePaul University, Columbia College, and the Catholic Theological Union, and lectured throughout the world. In his life and teachings, Wayne always promoted the concepts of community, service, and faith. He said, "We now know that each one of us inhabits, rather than possesses, what can be called local awareness. It makes our life tangible by filtering it through parameters of knowing and being that allow for this local type of consciousness, this knowing person here and now who is self-aware. When someone has a mystical experience, he or she is propelled into a cosmic kind of perception. The enlightened are those who have broken out of their local and regional, or individual and species awareness and have discovered other realms of consciousness beyond this sphere." Jennifer Harris Friends of Drepung Gomang Monastery Copyright © 2005 The University of Hawai'i Press

Spoken dialogue understanding using an incremental speech understanding method

In spoken dialogue, word sequences that span multiple user utterances may convey one meaning when they are interpreted together as a group and a different meaning when each utterance is interpreted in turn. Natural language processing methods that can deal with units that span multiple utterances are needed for such input. However, in order to enable a spoken dialogue system to respond quickly to the user, it is desirable that interpretations are determined on a per-utterance basis as each utterance is given. In order to satisfy both demands simultaneously in this paper we present an incremental speech understanding method and the ISSS algorithm that is one implementation of this method. The incremental speech understanding method that we propose involves concatenating speech recognition results with previously obtained recognition results, enumerating a list of speech understanding hypotheses that can be derived from these results, ordering these using a priority measure that combines both separate priority measures assigned by both the speech and language processing modules to determine the most probable understanding result. In practice, this is implemented using the N-best hypotheses from the speech recognition system; we avoid an exhaustive enumeration of understanding hypotheses, and adopt a beam-search in the ISSS algorithm that we formulate here. In addition, in order to evaluate the proposed method, we also present a new evaluation metric for speech understanding methods that takes context into account, and have evaluated our proposed method using data gathered from human–computer dialogues. We have compared the method to a speech understanding method that does not consider word sequences that span multiple utterances and show that our proposed method results in statistically significant improvements in speech understanding accuracy. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Comp Jpn, 36(12): 75–84, 2005; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/scj.20211

A NEURAL NETWORK MODEL WITH FEATURE SELECTION FOR KOREAN SPEECH ACT CLASSIFICATION

A speech act is a linguistic action intended by a speaker. Speech act classification is an essential part of a dialogue understanding system because the speech act of an utterance is closely tied with the user's intention in the utterance. We propose a neural network model for Korean speech act classification. In addition, we propose a method that extracts morphological features from surface utterances and selects effective ones among the morphological features. Using the feature selection method, the proposed neural network can partially increase precision and decrease training time. In the experiment, the proposed neural network showed better results than other models using comparatively high-level linguistic features. Based on the experimental result, we believe that the proposed neural network model is suitable for real field applications because it is easy to expand the neural network model into other domains. Moreover, we found that neural networks can be useful in speech act classification if we can convert surface sentences into vectors with fixed dimensions by using an effective feature selection method.

DOMAIN KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION AND PLAN RECOGNITION BY PROBABILISTIC REASONING

This paper introduces a statistical framework for extracting medical domain knowledge from heterogeneous corpora. The acquired information is incorporated into a natural language understanding agent and applied to DIKTIS, an existing web-based educational dialogue system for the chemotherapy of nosocomial and community acquired pneumonia, aiming at providing a more intelligent natural language interaction. Unlike the majority of existing dialogue understanding engines, the presented system automatically encodes semantic representation of a user's query using Bayesian networks. The structure of the networks is determined from annotated dialogue corpora using the Bayesian scoring method, thus eliminating the tedious and costly process of manually coding domain knowledge. The conditional probability distributions are estimated during a training phase using data obtained from the same set of dialogue acts. In order to cope with words absent from our restricted dialogue corpus, a separate offline module was incorporated, which estimates their semantic role from both medical and general raw text corpora, correlating them with known lexical-semantically similar words or predefined topics. Lexical similarity is identified on the basis of both contextual similarity and co-occurrence in conjunctive expressions. The evaluation of the platform was performed against the existing language natural understanding module of DIKTIS, the architecture of which is based on manually embedded domain knowledge.

Using e-learning dialogues in higher education

Dialogue is arguably one of the most important components of any learning process. However, as student numbers increase and more emphasis is given to electronic delivery of courses, opportunities for effective dialogue may be missed. The technology to support e-learning dialogue is readily available, but design of the dialogue structures and understanding of learners’ online communication behaviour requires further research. This paper reports on a study of the use of asynchronous discussion forums to support online dialogue in undergraduate learning and teaching in two groups of students. Initial empirical evidence, obtained from online communication behaviour data and assessment results, is presented to support a positive association between students' participation in e-learning dialogues and learning outcomes. Other factors that could influence effective exploitation of e-learning dialogues such as tutor intervention, students' perceptions, dialogue quality and learning outcomes are discussed, along with implications for the design of such systems.

What Must We Mean By ?Community?? A Processive Account

The term "community" in ethics and bioethics traditionally has been used to designate either a specific kind of moral relationship available to rational agents or, in contrast, the context in which any sense of rational agency can even be understood. I argue that bioethics is better served when both "selves" and "community" are expressed through a more processive language that highlights the functional character of such concepts. In particular, I see the turn to "processive" community in bioethics as a turn towards method, contextualization, and narrative. In clinical practice, such a processive account demands that bioethics concentrate on methods of developing healthy dialogue and deeper understanding from within the problematic situation rather than trying to "fix" problems using ethical tools developed from outside the present situation. "Community," I argue, is in and of the interactive processes of inquiry itself. Such inquiry, such "communitying," requires that we engage individual patients in context; it demands more than simply gaining their permission or mere consent; it demands developing a supportive environment for participation.

CIOMS and ICH Initiatives in Pharmacovigilance and Risk Management

In this article we review the current initiatives by the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) and the International Conference on Harmonisation (ICH) on pharmacovigilance planning that are due for general release during 2004. These initiatives could form the basis for applying concepts of risk management to medicines throughout their life cycle, from preclinical and clinical development to marketed use. The CIOMS VI Working Group (with 28 senior scientists worldwide from drug regulatory authorities and pharmaceutical companies) is currently developing scientific guidance that relates to clinical trials for medicines during development. It recommends a developmental pharmacovigilance concept - a 'living' concept that would start early in drug development supporting the science and ethics of research leading up to licensing (marketing authorisation) and continuing to post-authorisation (postmarketing) pharmacovigilance. This approach is seen as complementary to current ICH initiatives called 'Pharmacovigilance Planning'. ICH will introduce two concepts in pharmacovigilance management of medicinal products: the 'Pharmacovigilance Specification' and the 'Pharmacovigilance Plan'. The 'Pharmacovigilance Specification' will summarise important knowns and unknowns about the medicine. It will include safety risks identified at the licensing stage, potential risks and any key missing information. These elements will be essential to the formulation of pharmacovigilance plans. Dialogue and common understanding between regulators and the pharmaceutical industry will be a key factor for developing pharmacovigilance plans during the life cycle of medicines. Appropriate interaction with health professionals and patients should also be planned for the future as regulatory systems become more transparent. Where no significant issues are apparent at the licensing (marketing authorisation) stage, routine pharmacovigilance practices will be followed during the marketing phase. Where issues do exist or the data are limited, further study, including epidemiological approaches can be planned. All types of medicines (new drugs, biological agents, orphan drugs) may be involved in these concepts, as would major extensions to existing medicines. Currently ongoing CIOMS and ICH initiatives are in line with emerging risk-management strategies in the US, the European Union and Japan aimed at early and proactive pharmacovigilance.

Re-thinking trust in a performative culture: the case of education

This paper examines the way in which the notion of trust is being reformulated within teacher professionalism in England. It does this by setting the discussion within the economic context in which education is placed and examines the competitiveness settlement and its construction of a high skills economy marked by high trust relations. It is argued that this model of the English economy does not sit well with existing relations. The paper then draws upon material from the Learning and Skills Council, which sets the framework within which postcompulsory education and training is placed. It relates this discussion to the recent history of managerialism as well as performance management exploring the implications for trust relations. The paper then examines the nature of teacher professionalism and argues that current interventions work within a truncated model of trust, which is contrasted with a dialogic understanding of professionalism.

On ‘appropriation’. A critical reappraisal of the concept and its application in global art practices

This paper discusses critically the concept of ‘appropriation’ and evaluates the usefulness of applying the term in the analysis of cross-cultural communication in a global world. Specifically, I look at contemporary art practices that involve the ‘appropriation’ of ideas, symbols and artefacts from other cultures. Early twentieth century theories of cultural change and cultural contact (in German-speaking anthropology, the United States and Britain) were clearly interested in the ‘migration’ of particular elements (symbolic and material) across cultural boundaries, but suffered from a holistic view of bounded cultures. Recent theories of cultural globalisation on the other hand do not pay sufficient attention to the individual actors (as opposed to groups of individuals) in cross-cultural contact. Hybridisation, creolisation, transculturation and other concepts focus more generically on mixtures of different cultural practices in entire societies, but less on individual strategies. Appropriation then is reevaluated as a hermeneutic procedure, an act of dialogical understanding, by which individual actors negotiate access to, and traffic in, symbolic elements which have no fixed meaning.

Exploring the written feedback dialogue: a research, learning and teaching practice

The final paper of this Special Issue on Exploratory Practice (EP) is another illustration of the potential of EP for doctoral research. More importantly, like the preceding paper by Gunn it emphasizes learner as well as teacher understanding, and, most importantly, it also explores ‘quality’ in interpersonal relationships.This paper reports on research, conducted in an EFL Academic Writing context, about a written dialogue between a teacher and her learners. This dialogue consists of the learners’ written text, the teacher’s written feedback and the ongoing responses that ensue from this initial exchange.Most past research into teachers’ written comments on student-writers’ work has examined quantitatively either the teachers’ or the learners’ perspective, and has emphasized the outcomes of the learners’ revision process. A comprehensive analysis of the intentions and interpretations of the exchange from both the teacher’s and the learners’ perspective, as well as of the dynamic nature of the dialogue within its full pedagogical context, has not yet been done. It was hoped that such an analysis could lead to some generalizations which, in turn, could lead to recommendations for improving pedagogical practice.However, what began as a quest for a theory that could inspire guidelines for teacher effectiveness became a quest for an understanding of the conditions under which effectiveness could best be achieved. In EP terms, these conditions represent life in the classroom and the quest illustrates the aim of teacher research: to strive toward improving the quality of the life that will enable more effective use of the feedback dialogue as a crucial element in the writing process.The paper begins by inserting the current research into the context of qualitative research literature, leading directly to EP principles. Reporting on the research itself, it shows how some of the principles were manifested in the research practices. The findings reveal that it is precisely through dialogue (the written exchange as a social enterprise) between the participants in the learning-teaching situation (in a spirit of collegiality), that an understanding of the feedback dialogue can best be reached. Herein lies the promise of an improvement in the quality of life, quality of education and ultimately quality of learning (Allwright, this issue).

The New Poverty Studies: The Ethnography of Power, Politics, and Impoverished People in the United States

Stock market euphoria and blind faith in the post cold war economy have driven the topic of poverty from popular and scholarly discussion in the United States. At the same time the gap between the rich and poor has never been wider. The New Poverty Studies critically examines the new war against the poor that has accompanied the rise of the New Economy in the past two decades, and details the myriad ways poor people have struggled against it. The essays collected here explore how global, national, and local structures of power produce poverty and affect the material well-being, social relations and politicization of the poor. In updating the 1960s encounter between ethnography and U.S. poverty, The New Poverty Studies highlights the ways poverty is constructed across multiple scales and multiple axes of difference. Questioning the common wisdom that poverty persists because of the pathology, social isolation and welfare state dependency of the poor, the contributors to The New Poverty Studies point instead to economic restructuring and neoliberal policy reforms which have caused increased social inequality and economic polarization in the U.S. Contributors include: Georges Fouron, Donna Goldstein, Judith Goode, Susan B. Hyatt, Catherine Kingfisher, Peter Kwong, Vin Lyon-Callo, Jeff Maskovsky, Sandi Morgen, Leith Mullings, Frances Fox Piven, Matthew Rubin, Nina Glick Schiller, Carol Stack, Jill Weigt, Eve Weinbaum, Brett Williams, and Patricia Zavella. These contributions provide a dynamic understanding of poverty and immiseration North American Dialogue, Vol. 4, No. 1, Nov. 2001

TGF-β1 synergizes with GM-CSF to promote the generation of glial cell-derived dendriform cells in vitro

Microglia are often considered a type of tissue macrophages analogous Langerhans’ cells, while dendritic cells (DC) can be generated in vitro from cultured microglia in the presence of GM-CSF. In this study, we show that TGF-β1, in the presence of GM-CSF, promoted the growth and differentiation of glial cell-derived dendritic cells (GC–DC). TGF-β1-driven GC–DC exhibited an immature state reflected by low CD11c expression, augmented endocytosis, and reduced antigen presentation. Expression of Fas was inhibited in GM-CSF+TGF-β1-supplemented cell cultures and may relate to a long life span of GC–DC treated with GM-CSF+ TGF-β1. IL-10 and IL-12 mRNA on GC–DC was not affected upon exposure to GM-CSF alone or to GM-CSF+ IFN-γ, GM-CSF + IL-10 or GM-CSF+ TGF-β1. In sharp contrast, TGF-β1, in the presence of GM-CSF, dramatically up-regulated the expression of TNF-α and TGF-β1 mRNA. These results demonstrate that TGF-β1 seems to play a crucial role in the differentiation, functional skewing, and cytokine profile of GC–DC. TGF-β1-driven GC–DC awaits further investigation to facilitate a better understanding of the glia-T cell dialog as well as the pathogenesis and immunotherapy of central nervous system inflammatory and degener.

Morality in Public Life

I am honored - and deeply humbled - to be invited by the Association of Muslim Social Scientists to deliver the Ismail al-Faruqi Memorial Lecture this evening. Professor Ismail al-Faruqi was undoubtedly one of the most accom­plished and one of the most illustrious thinkers that the Muslim world has produced in recent decades. His writings, which span a whole spectrum of social concerns, have contributed immensely to a better understanding of tawhid, Islamic culture, and interfaith dialogue among both Muslims and non-Muslims. As a committed intellectual who translated ideas into action, the late Professor al-Faruqi was an honest and principled voice in the strug­gle for a just world. It was because of his own integrity that he regarded morality in public life as fundamental to social justice. Muslims, more than perhaps most people, should be able to appreciate the importance of morality in public life. And yet most states established in the name oflslam have failed miserably to uphold the basic standards of public morality. What explains this huge paradox? How can we bridge this yawning chasm between the ideals of which we are conscious and the real­ities that confront us? How will globalization help or hinder our efforts to imbue public life with moral values and principles? ...

Foreign Policy and the Politics of Alterity: A Dialogical Understanding of International Relations

Trying specifically not to fall into either eclecticism or redundancy, this paper is an attempt to develop a dialogical understanding of international relations within the meta-theoretical field of constructivism. Dialogism holds that the social world is constructed through an interweaving of mutually-responsive discourses between several agents. Further, it provides an interpretative tool, the hermeneutical locus, to understand agents' identities as a factor in international relations by discerning their expressivity, contextuality and relationality. Dealing more closely with the questions of identity and identity formation within the discipline of International Relations, the paper further regards national identity as a factor which is expressed in a particular aspect of foreign policy: the politics of alterity. Grounding my approach in the works of the Russian intellectual Mikhail Mikhailovitch Bakhtin, in the first part of the paper I define what is to be understood by dialogism and its constitutive notion of transgredience. The second part is dedicated to the actual integration of dialogism within the discipline of International Relations. An example drawn from Japanese domestic and foreign policy prior to the Second World War further facilitates the comprehension of the theoretical argument concerning the link between the national and the international in a politics of alterity.

An alternative strategy for transcultural communication: Dialogic understanding of multiple voices

Any phenomena or events of any culture require the perspective of other cultures to develop their potential. Much of the mainstream writing about transcultural communication in the West today is predicated on the fact that the West is a bad guy, and the non‐West is a good guy. This presumption is too simplistic because cultures are never semiotic systems with a closed totality. The aim of this essay is to define a new strategy for transcultural communication derived from the Russian philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin's theoretical and critical concepts. His concept of dialogism, and of language provide us the specific ways in which those producers orchestrate diverse social voices. His emphasis on a boundless context helps us avoid formalist insistence on human relations. In other words, his emphasis on the situated utterance and the interpersonal generation of meaning avoids a value‐free semiotics.

On the use of prosody in automatic dialogue understanding

In this paper, we show how prosodic information can be used in automatic dialogue systems and give some examples of promising new approaches. Most of these examples are taken from our own work in the V erbmobil speech-to-speech translation system and in the EVAR train timetable dialogue system. In a `prosodic orbit', we first present units, phenomena, annotations and statistical methods from the signal (acoustics) to the dialogue understanding phase. We show then, how prosody can be used together with other knowledge sources for the task of resegmentation if a first segmentation turns out to be wrong, and how an integrated approach leads to better results than a sequential use of the different knowledge sources; then we present a hybrid approach which is used to perform a shallow parsing and which uses prosody to guide the parsing; finally, we show how a critical system evaluation can help to improve the overall performance of automatic dialogue systems.

Actions and discourses for transformative understanding in a middle school science class

So that we might understand better how the discursive practices of classroom participants lead to students' transformative understanding, we immersed ourselves in a Grade 8 science class for an extended period of observation. Our observation and interview data were interpreted from two overlapping perspectives, namely, an action orientation and a discourse orientation. We found that the teacher's actions encouraged univocal discourse between students and their reproductive understanding of scientific concepts. We argue that before a class can become more like a scientific discourse community, teachers need to promote dialogic discourse and transformative understanding. The contextual descriptions and interpretations presented might help teachers form images of classroom practices that will be conducive to students' transformative understandings of science.

Robust numeric recognition in spoken language dialogue

This paper addresses the problem of automatic numeric recognition and understanding in spoken language dialogue. We show that accurate numeric understanding in fluent unconstrained speech demands maintaining robustness at several different levels of system design, including acoustic, language, understanding and dialogue. We describe a robust system for numeric recognition and present algorithms for feature extraction, acoustic and language modeling, discriminative training, utterance verification and numeric understanding and validation. Experimental results from a field-trial of a spoken dialogue system are presented that include customers' responses to credit card and telephone number requests.

Cross cultural perspectives of teachers: a study in three countries

In a shrinking world where globalization has blurred the boundaries across nation states and cultural divides, limitations on intercultural communication can readily give rise to glib generalizations and lack of understanding of diversity. Acknowledging the key role of teachers in shaping the views of future generations, this paper reports on the first stage of a research study on the intercultural understanding of teachers in Australia, Japan, and Thailand. Overall, the teacher participants had diverse cross-cultural experience, differing both in extent and nature of the contact. The methodology used a common survey instrument, except for its language of presentation. However, instead of using a traditional comparative approach to contrast responses of the three target groups, the study asked teachers to provide their perceptions of prevailing world views of people in their own AND the other two countries. The reciprocal nature of the observations provides a powerful methodology to explore perceived intercultural similarities and differences. The article also considers problems associated with response set in investigations of this kind. Three scales are considered — change through intervention, symbolic inner self, and independent thought and action — and the data reveal some similarities but also some striking differences in perceptions across countries. The differences signal a lack of intercultural understanding which is being explored further in a second, qualitative stage of the research. The findings indicate the need for increasing shared programs, exchanges and other opportunities for reciprocal relations that foster genuine dialogue, partnership and intercultural understanding between countries.

International collaborative workshops. A 6-year partnership between Canada and China.

Interprofessional exchanges such as workshops are common activities in international development programs. The authors describe processes used to select, implement, and evaluate six collaborative workshops held in Tianjin, China, between 1990 and 1995. These workshops targeted curricular change for a baccalaureate nursing program in Tianjin Medical University. Our experience highlights the importance of understanding the assumptive base for change, developing an institutional memory in both partner universities, introducing interactive teaching methods congruent with Chinese value systems, and using a formative evaluation strategy to foster cross-cultural dialogue and mutual understanding among project partners.