Generative Dialogue Research Articles

New Materialist Becomings and Futurities: A Panel Intra-view

Derived from Karen Barad’s intra-action, the term intra-view aims to do justice to the continuous process of becoming that is evident in the asynchronous, generative dialogue of this panel. This panel intra-view provides readers with the opportunity to think with the participants, Fernando Hernández-Hernández, Iris van der Tuin, Nathalie Sinclair, Olga Cielemęcka and Monika Rogowska-Stangret, and their encounters and engagements with new materialism, and how they in turn affect our scholarship.

Dialogue of generations: A. S. Lappo-Danilevsky and V. I. Lamansky

Dialogue of generations: A. S. Lappo-Danilevsky and V. I. Lamansky

Information and design: book symposium on Luciano Floridi’s The Logic of Information

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to review and discuss Luciano Floridi’s 2019 book The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design, the latest instalment in his philosophy of information (PI) tetralogy, particularly with respect to its implications for library and information studies (LIS).Design/methodology/approachNine scholars with research interests in philosophy and LIS read and responded to the book, raising critical and heuristic questions in the spirit of scholarly dialogue. Floridi responded to these questions.FindingsFloridi’s PI, including this latest publication, is of interest to LIS scholars, and much insight can be gained by exploring this connection. It seems also that LIS has the potential to contribute to PI’s further development in some respects.Research limitations/implicationsFloridi’s PI work is technical philosophy for which many LIS scholars do not have the training or patience to engage with, yet doing so is rewarding. This suggests a role for translational work between philosophy and LIS.Originality/valueThe book symposium format, not yet seen in LIS, provides forum for sustained, multifaceted and generative dialogue around ideas.

Dialogue systems with audio context

Research on building dialogue systems that converse with humans naturally has recently attracted a lot of attention. Most work on this area assumes text-based conversation, where the user message is modeled as a sequence of words in a vocabulary. Real-world human conversation, in contrast, involves other modalities, such as voice, facial expression and body language, which can influence the conversation significantly in certain scenarios. In this work, we explore the impact of incorporating the audio features of the user message into generative dialogue systems. Specifically, we first design an auxiliary response retrieval task for audio representation learning. Then, we use word-level modality fusion to incorporate the audio features as additional context to our main generative model. Experiments show that our audio-augmented model outperforms the audio-free counterpart on perplexity, response diversity and human evaluation.

ВІЗІЇ ФАХУ РЕПОРТЕРА РИШАРДОМ КАПУСЦІНСЬКИМ У КОНТЕКСТІ ІДЕЙ СВІТОВОЇ ГЛОБАЛІЗАЦІЇ ТА СУЧАСНИХ ТЕНДЕНЦІЙ РОЗВИТКУ ЖУРНАЛІСТИКИ

Dialogue of cultures, dialogue of civilisations, dialogue of generations, intentionality of daily work of a journalist - this is what Kapuściński saw as the task of a reporter working outside his homeland. Because the pen worker who does the editorial work within the country is monopolarly tuned, that is, he cannot reflect the entire multi-vector of the globalised world because of the enormous pressure of the environment that he is experiencing. In another civilisational and cultural environment, the reporter is not connected by thousands of invisible threads to the environment (except purely formal ones), and he can claim a more or less objective perception of social reality without resorting to its reception. After trying to add his vision, commenting, the reporter becomes an analyst manipulator, acting for a specific purpose: personal (willing to speak) or ordered (so it is necessary, because someone wants it). Of course, no journalist, reporter, or other media worker wants the results of his work to create any kind of negative discourse in the society of a particular country, and more so in the whole region. But by resorting to manipulation, namely by actually usurping the knowledge of the world, the media man thus makes a wrong act for the sake of (in his view) the right thing to do.

Retrotopia: Post-memory and a “Reactionary Choice of the Past”

The article considers the relationship between memory and post-memory through the lens of translating the experience of generations. The author takes Z. Baumann’s term “retrotopia” as the basis of the research. As a new mode of referring to the past retrotopia he treats it as the phenomenon of reaction in socio-psychological and political meanings. The escape of the obsessive retrotopic past is visible in the ability to have a dialogue (Z. Baumann), and things that link to the experience of previous generations play here a vital role. The paper analyzes variants of things’ behavior in their inter-generation interaction: the mode of tactility in collecting things serves the setting “total recall” (M. Stepanova “To the memory of memory); interaction with other people’s things (the movie “Khrustalyov, the car”) when a live dialogue of generations is impossible. The refusal of things to converse is a symptom of guilt in losing the past. Retrotopia coordinates with another important concept — post-memory with the cult of accumulating and preserving heritage interpreted as the result of ideology and upbringing. The cult of legacy testifies to real anxiety of survival. Post-memory as a cult of heritage strives to reproduce historical experience in the effects of representation, and discourses of collective memory and traumas effectively suppress and replace real memory of the historical experience. Thus, it substantiates the transition from retrotopia to utopia, from heritage to oblivion. Retrotopia is a form of oblivion that forces one to delve into the past. It is not for the sake of the past, but to forget the impending terrible future. Present-day digital media create a new arrangement of memory based on the value of the concrete and the individual. History starts to converge with memory coinciding in the limit with infinitely changing fragments and connections that memory organizes not by the principle of cause-and-effect but by associations and similarities. This program has features of principally different ways of managing the heritage: retrotopia (the goal is to save and preserve), and utopia (to put the past to rest).

Spell and hell of Morocco (Ukrainian-Moroccan dialogue of generations in the Polish interpretation)

The author of the article, Walentyna Sobol, analyzes documentary and literary books from Morocco and two émigré writers about Morocco. These are “Spells of Morocco” – the Ukrainian forgotten author Sofia Jabłońska (1907–1971) and “Moon in Tears” – contemporary writer Morocco Ouard Saillo, born in Morocco in 1974. Ouardy Saillo’s book, decorated with photos of the Saillo family, was written in German. For the first time is published in Polish translated by Barbara Otwinowska (published in 2005 in Warsaw). In 2018, in Kiev were published 107 photographs of Sofia Jabłońska from her times of work and travel around the world, including Morocco. The goal of the article is to reveal the phenomenon of persistence and bravery of both writers, different, but sometimes very similar intertextuality . The narrative of the documents is examined using a methodological approach, especially in terms of: “intertextuality is a study of the memory of literature” (Tadeusz Sławek). Using modern research in anthropology, including the lexicon of the culture of memory “Modi memorandi”, the author of the article investigates the phenomenon of intertextuality in the narratives of Jabłońska and Saillo. This comparative study of the autobiographical works of Ukrainian and Moroccan writers in Poland not only reveals the conclusions, but also opens wide research perspectives.

Theorizing the Temporal Exception: The Importance of the Present for the Study of War

AbstractDespite an increasing focus on the importance of temporality, time, and timing in international relations (IR) and security studies, there has been relatively less movement toward thinking about the temporal present as a conceptual area of inquiry. This article argues that taking the present seriously as a concept, method, and theoretical area of analysis offers unique value for the study of war. Paying attention to the manner in which the present time of war (wartime) is sociopolitically articulated as a space of temporal exception exposes how it is understood as diverging from representations of politics, past and future. It also foregrounds war's irreducible temporal dimension and exposes the relational bases of wartime's apparent universality. This article uses a close reading of Clausewitz's On War (1832) as generative dialogue and illustrative example, showing how an awareness of the importance of temporal dynamics—particularly, the concept of the present—is both valuable and workable in the study of war. A temporal imaginary of war centered on what Hutchings calls the “heterotemporal” present enhances inquiry into contemporary political violence, the ontology of war, and the emergent attributes of collective violence.

Transfer Hierarchical Attention Network for Generative Dialog System

In generative dialog systems, learning representations for the dialog context is a crucial step in generating high quality responses. The dialog systems are required to capture useful and compact information from mutually dependent sentences such that the generation process can effectively attend to the central semantics. Unfortunately, existing methods may not effectively identify importance distributions for each lower position when computing an upper level feature, which may lead to the loss of information critical to the constitution of the final context representations. To address this issue, we propose a transfer learning based method named transfer hierarchical attention network (THAN). The THAN model can leverage useful prior knowledge from two related auxiliary tasks, i.e., keyword extraction and sentence entailment, to facilitate the dialog representation learning for the main dialog generation task. During the transfer process, the syntactic structure and semantic relationship from the auxiliary tasks are distilled to enhance both the word-level and sentence-level attention mechanisms for the dialog system. Empirically, extensive experiments on the Twitter Dialog Corpus and the PERSONA-CHAT dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed THAN model compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

What’s in a Name? Unpacking Students’ Roles in Higher Education through Neoliberal and Social Justice Lenses

There has been an increase in research and practice exploring how students can gain agency to shape higher education experiences. Numerous terms evoking certain metaphors have entered the discussions around engaging students, from students as consumers or producers, to students as creators, partners, or change agents. There is scope within the evolving literature to explore the differentiations between these metaphors and how underlying assumptions ultimately shape our practices and research. We thus unpack the above five metaphors frequently used to redefine students’ roles in higher education. We then engage in a dialogue across differences: highlighting how our own two distinct perspectives on the research area and practice – grounded in neoliberalism and social justice – align, overlap, differ, and provide constraints or affordances for student engagement. We offer a critical and reflective commentary questioning the drivers of students’ changing roles in higher education in the hope of inviting others into generative dialogue toward expanding the evolving field of student engagement.

Rethinking professionalization: A generative dialogue on CSR practitioners1

AbstractStudies of emerging professions are more and more at the crossroad of different fields of research, and field boundaries thus hamper the development of a full-fledged conversation. In an attempt to bridge these boundaries, this article offers a ‘generative dialogue’ about the redefinition of the professionalization project through the case of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practitioners. We bring together prominent scholars from two distinct academic communities—CSR and the professions—to shed light on some of the unsolved questions and dilemmas around contemporary professionalization through an example of an emerging profession. Key learnings from this dialogue point us toward the rethinking of processes of professionalization, in particular the role of expertise, the unifying force of common normative goals, and collaborative practises between networks of stakeholders. As such, we expand the research agenda for scholars of the professions and of CSR.

Positioning, conflict, and dialogue in management teams

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the dynamics of social positioning and interpersonal conflicts in management teams. This paper utilizes positioning theory to analyze team conflicts by combining microlevel interaction analysis and explicit, meso-level team research in the context of managerial work.Design/methodology/approachThis research is based on an analysis of 34 conflict episodes that occurred during management board meetings conducted by two Finnish public research institutions. By analyzing naturally occurring interactions and video material, this paper presents a discursive analysis of conflict from the perspective of positioning theory, focusing on local moral orders, social positions and the construction of dialogue.FindingsThis study’s findings illuminate how team conflicts may be understood in terms of positioning theory, as well as how positioning is connected to managing conflicts and constructing either degenerative or generative dialogue in teams. The present study indicates possibilities for applying positioning theory as a methodological tool when studying team interactions and dialogue.Practical implicationsThe study offers practical implications regarding team conflict management. By developing an understanding of the positioning dynamics of managers and other team members, one can help create constructive and generative dialogue in teams.Originality/valueFrom a methodological perspective, this paper presents a novel approach to the study of team conflicts and outlines several suggestions regarding the theoretical approach in the analysis of team interaction and dynamics.

What is business school research for? Academic and stakeholder perspectives, politics and relationality

ABSTRACTThrough an empirically grounded analysis of contested interpretations of impact held by business school academics and wider stakeholders, we provide a political and relational understanding of research impact whereby impacts are realized through situated, relational and ongoing interactions. Our qualitative study of three UK business and management schools, comprising interviews with around 70 researchers, academic leaders and stakeholders explores conceptualizations of impact, examines the processes through which impact is achieved and considers the influence of the Research Excellence Framework (REF). The inclusion of academic leaders and business stakeholders adds value to studies that have focused primarily on academic researchers. We present a nuanced picture of the ways in which academics and business stakeholders conceptualize impact and navigate the complexity of roles and relationships in this arena. Implications for practice include the desirability of embracing different understandings of impact, creating space for generative dialogue and incorporating impact more explicitly in teaching and learning.

EDUCATION COMMODIFICATION: PROCESSES AND RESULTS

The paper analyzes processes and results of the commercialization and commodification of education seen as leading trends in Russian and world education. Methodology and research methods. Theoretical analysis of the problems appeared in Russian and world education was carried out in the context of socio-psychological and practical psychological analysis of its trends. The world and all spheres of its existence and development, as one of the manifestations of the phenomenon of globalization, taking place in the context of a systemic crisis of capitalist relations, is experiencing an intensive growth of the processes of commercialization and commodification. These processes are the most significant where commercialization, contrary to the traditions and basic meanings of this or that practice, seems to be a natural part of activities. One of these areas is education. Modern primary, secondary and higher education in the countries of the former USSR and many other former countries of the «socialist camp» are experiencing an intense crisis. They are increasingly desacralized whereas, their conceptual basis is almost completely lost. It becomes not an institution (of retransmission and creativity) of culture and human development, not an institute of care for the younger generation, but an institution for the sale of services for the (trans) formation of a «service person». Com mercialization in the conditions of desacralization goes into total commodification. Education becomes the business of delivering «educational services.»The state bureaucracy, as well as heads of corporations and enterprises of various types actively and systematically intervene in the processes of education. Their goal is to impose education, starting from the very first stages and ending with the last ones, their schemes, values, formats. These goals of consumption and exploitation of human and other resources are alien to education as early as possible. As a result, the selection and upbringing and training of professional, corresponding to a certain organizational culture of personnel goes into the formation of specialists with a narrowly limited, special set of knowledge, allowing to perform certain production and everyday functions, but not allowing a person to self-realize, form and develop themselves as an individual. Large-scale and aggressive penetration of alien ideas and structures of relations, the seizure of education by ideology and technologies of the «market»type leads to the phenomenon of «death of the university», other levels of education. The systemic crisis of education, deformations in the relationship of a person with himself and the world is the result of desacralization, the identity of ignorance and alienation. However, universities and schools, as specific for each time space of the dialogue of generations, the creative dialogue of man and culture, continue to evolve. Their forms change and are refined, in a battle with consumerism and commodification, their priorities and functions. They continue to exist not as functions of governing the state by «faceless masses». They continue to exist not as a function of the exploitation of human resources by business, but as a function of cultural transmission and development. Commercialization can be a situational and insignificant component of the successful work of universities and schools, but not the goal and not the main condition for their livelihoods.

Creating ‘safe-ish’ learning spaces—attempts to practice an ethics of care

One way to approach the project of decolonising the university is to employ decolonising pedagogies, which allow the whole of people’s lived experience into teaching and learning spaces, affirm this experience as worthy of scholarly attention and create a dialogue between experience and theory. Encouraging the sharing of personal stories among diverse and differently positioned students however brings up questions about “safe spaces”. Using Tronto’s ethics of care as a normative framework we will reflect on a range of snapshot to exemplify ethical dilemmas encountered in a teacher education classroom within a digital storytelling project. Based on this analysis two main assumptions are challenged: that safe spaces exist and that safety is something that can be bestowed on students by the lecturer. We argue for teaching and learning that facilitates a heightened self-awareness on the part of (in particular white) educators about their own gendered, classed and raced subjectivities and how these play out in the classroom—a practice of care both towards others and towards the self. This self-awareness and self-care needs to be matched by the development of facilitation skills that may help to create learning spaces that re-affirm difference among learners while also enabling generative dialogue. We conclude with practical suggestions on how to implement such an attempt at practicing the ethics of care in the classroom.

Generative dialogue: A concept analysis

The emerging concept of generative dialogue is accompanied by strong claims for its benefit. A literature review identified six dominant models of generative dialogue across the range of disciplines of education, business studies, counselling and psychology. Through the analysis, commonalities and differences between the different models are identified, with an ultimate goal of providing an overarching description of those crucial attributes that make generative dialogue and its implementation beneficial as a management tool in education.

Generative Dialogue 設計方法の提案及び有効性の検証

Generative Dialogue 設計方法の提案及び有効性の検証

RUBER: An Unsupervised Method for Automatic Evaluation of Open-Domain Dialog Systems

Open-domain human-computer conversation has been attracting increasing attention over the past few years. However, there does not exist a standard automatic evaluation metric for open-domain dialog systems; researchers usually resort to human annotation for model evaluation, which is time- and labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose RUBER, a Referenced metric and Unreferenced metric Blended Evaluation Routine, which evaluates a reply by taking into consideration both a groundtruth reply and a query (previous user-issued utterance). Our metric is learnable, but its training does not require labels of human satisfaction. Hence, RUBER is flexible and extensible to different datasets and languages. Experiments on both retrieval and generative dialog systems show that RUBER has a high correlation with human annotation, and that RUBER has fair transferability over different datasets.

Being open to the world

As the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka poetically phrased it, human beings are “beings of the far reaches.” Our human condition is, in other words, conditioned by the existential fact that we are beings who are open, attuned, and responsive to the world. Building upon and extending some of my earlier reflections on the distinctive modes of openness, attunement, and responsivity that are revealed in the context of ethnographic practice, this essay will seek to clear some new pathways to potentiating generative dialogue between anthropological and philosophical phenomenology. In particular, the article will explore how a phenomenologically informed analysis of the specific form of bracketing that arises in ethnographic encounters—what I have termed the ethnographic epoché—can help anthropologists and philosophers alike to rethink possibilities for thinking, not only in the context of their respective modes of inquiry but also at points where the two fields mutually intersect.

Dialogue

In this non-partisan dialogue, we examine Donald J. Trump’s deal-making during the first six months of his presidency. Rather than judging the man or evaluating his policies, we regard his actions as an opportunity to reflect on the realities of flawed and frail leaders more generally, and the impact they have on others. We follow Isaacs’ recommendations for ‘generative dialogue’ to overcome fragmentation in the public discourse about President Trump and in the academic literature about leadership. The dialogical method has a long tradition. Socrates engaging ordinary Athenian citizens in dialogues probing central ethical and political values and assumptions is a keystone moment in western intellectual history. In eastern philosophy, the dialogical method was used extensively in the ancient Indian scriptures, Upanishad (which literally means “sitting down beside”): they portray a teacher, a disciple, peers, and scholars engaged in dialogue in the court of a King, aiming to stamp out ignorance, find meaning, and advance new ideas and institutions. In our present dialogue, we invite the reader to contemplate with us the dialectic of character and competence in leadership, and to consider Trump-inspired theses about leadership with relevance for research and practice.