Human Dialogue Research Articles

Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900-1949

Fortunately for us, brothers Heinrich and Thomas Mann remained devoted and eloquent correspondents even while disagreeing passionately on matters literary, political, philosophical, and personal. In their correspondence, set against a shifting backdrop of locations in Europe and America, mundane concerns blend easily with astonishing artistic and critical insights. That these irrepressible siblings were among the giants of twentieth-century letters gives their exchanges unique literary and historical fascination. Beginning in Germany and Italy at the turn of the century, the letters document with disarming immediacy the brothers' views on aesthetics, politics, and the social responsibility of the writer, as well as their mutual jealousy, admiration, rivalry, and loyalty. The devastating rift caused by Thomas's support of Germany during World War I and his brother's utter opposition to the war took many years to mend, but they found their way back to friendship in the 1920s. After Hitler rose to power, both writers ultimately sought refuge in the United States. The letters offer a moving portrayal of their struggle, as novelists and socially engaged intellectuals, to bear witness to the cataclysmic historical changes around them and to their experience of exile, in Europe and then in America. This first complete English translation of their correspondence is a dramatic human dialogue and a major literary event.

Negative feedback in information dialogues: identification, classification and problem-solving procedures

This research — essentially empirical and of a linguistic nature — takes as its departure point the notion of feedback and the analysis of feedback phenomena in French informative dialogues. Our main concern has been to try to map the theoretical models of dialogue control with the empirical reality of dialogue problems. Supported by the statement of Bunt (1995a) that “understanding dialogue behaviour is central to a theory of dialogue”, our research attempts to arrive at a better understanding of dialogue difficulties and reflects on how to construct an acceptable dialogue model adjusted in the best possible way to this complex reality. There is also a certain comparative perspective as we have been considering different kinds of dialogue data at different stages from human–human dialogues to human–machine dialogues.Our contribution will focus on three aspects:

Evolution of Higher Education

Universities and colleges in the United States are encountering a turbulent climate. The quality of their future in many ways depends on how well they respond to evolving realities in the larger world beyond their walls. Ultimately the most significant change affecting universities may be the continuing revolution in information technology. Improved information technology has made possible new methods of education. A high-level[*][1] Kellogg Commission letter to the presidents and chancellors of state universities and land-grant colleges[†][2] included this comment: “…the number of profit and nonprofit competitors to the traditional higher education has exploded. Our institutions now contend with an enormous variety of educational vendors offering postsecondary coursework, training, degrees, diplomas, and courses of one kind or another….” The letter cited as an example the University of Phoenix, “a publicly traded, accredited, for-profit institution of higher education” that “provides distance-learning opportunities to more than 20,000 students annually.” The importance of information technology has been repeatedly emphasized by Donald Langenberg, chancellor of the University of Maryland system. The University of Maryland uses information technology internally and externally. A master of science degree in computer systems management is available on the Internet. Students from Minnesota, Australia, Texas, and Saudi Arabia are participating. A particularly attractive market for such innovative educational options is the large and growing portion of the population aged 25 and older who want or need to update their skills or expand their knowledge. Public universities have experienced financial problems as many state legislatures lowered their appropriations. Universities in general have increased tuitions faster than inflation. Partly as a result, parents are questioning the quality of the instruction provided. Opinion is widespread that the teaching of undergraduates has a low priority. The criticism and budget cuts directed at universities have created unease and a corresponding search for solutions. A number of commissions have been formed to do studies and make recommendations. They tend to agree that the status quo cannot be maintained. Change will not come easily. Customary practices regarding tenure decisions that have existed for decades have become entitlements. The rigid departmental structure has become outmoded. Many of the best opportunities for significant scholarship lie in multidisciplinary areas. Yet a comment in the Kellogg Commission letter is to the effect that society has problems; universities have departments. The prestige of the presidency of universities has diminished and, as a result, so has the ability of presidents to bring about needed change. The average length of time a president spends in office has declined. Currently, the principal criterion on which presidents are judged is their ability to garner big contributions from individuals, foundations, or the legislature. Thus, faculty members must initiate and cooperate actively in responding to the changed realities. A core recommendation of the Kellogg Commission is the creation of enhanced learning communities whose top priority is facilitating learning by students. Undergraduates would receive special attention. Professors would also be learners. The barriers between departments would be lowered. The criteria employed in decisions concerning tenure would place enhanced weight on the quality of teaching and on innovative scholarship in improving that quality. In seeking to attain a secure role for themselves in the future, universities have some advantages. They have generous alumni who remember their alma mater. And they provide parents of rebellious 18-year-olds a respectable way of getting their children out of the nest. Electronic communication may be the way of the future, but human dialogue conducted with friendly enthusiasm is to be treasured. If truly interacting learning communities were established, universities would be uniquely valuable. They would be alert custodians of the world's increasing heritage of knowledge. Their graduates would be better equipped for service to society and better motivated to engage in lifelong learning. Universities would merit the increased respect, approval, and financial support they so sorely need. [1]: #fn-1 [2]: #fn-2

The effect of resource limits and task complexity on collaborative planning in dialogue

This paper shows how agents' choice in communicative action can be designed to mitigate the effect of their resource limits in the context of particular features of a collaborative planning task. I first motivate a number of hypotheses about effective language behavior based on a statistical analysis of a corpus of natural collaborative planning dialogues. These hypotheses are then tested in a dialogue testbed whose design is motivated by the corpus analysis. Experiments in the testbed examine the interaction between (1) agents' resource limits in attentional capacity and inferential capacity; (2) agents' choice in communication; and (3) features of communicative tasks that affect task difficulty such as inferential complexity, degree of belief coordination required, and tolerance for errors. The results show that good algorithms for communication must be defined relative to the agents' resource limits and the features of the task. Algorithms that are inefficient for inferentially simple, low coordination or fault tolerant tasks are effective when tasks require coordination or complex inferences, or are fault intolerant. The results provide an explanation for the occurrence of utterances in human dialogues that, prima facie, appear inefficient, and provide the basis for the design of effective algorithms for communicative choice for resource limited agents.

Interactive translation of conversational speech

As communication becomes increasingly automated and transnational, the need for rapid, computer-aided speech translation grows. The Janus-II system uses paraphrasing and interactive error correction to boost performance. Janus-II operates on spontaneous conversational human dialogue in limited domains with vocabularies of 3,000 or more words. Current experiments involve 10,000 to 40,000 word vocabularies. It now accepts English, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Korean input, which it translates into any other of these languages. Beyond translating syntactically well-formed speech or carefully structured human-to-machine speech utterances, Janus-II research has focused on the more difficult task of translating spontaneous conversational speech between humans. This naturally requires a suitable database and task domain.

Cognition and causation in human experience

Arguments that thoughts cannot have the power to cause or influence behavior are briefly addressed. Despite being couched in traditional behavioristic terminology, some of these arguments actually invoke the very dualism that they criticize. Likewise problematic are portrayals of scientific activity as being necessarily grounded in an ontology of physical extension and an epistemology that grants the visual system (and hence observability) sole and supreme authority. Contemporary cognitivists challenge classical mind-body dualism and refer to thoughts and other “mental” phenomena as activities of the living system. Three conclusions are drawn: (1) humans think, (2) human thinking influences human behavior, and vice-versa, and (3) dialogues on this topic would be well served by a refinement of the questions under consideration.

3.3.3 TEAMING TECHNIQUES DERIVED FROM HUMAN SYSTEMS THEORY: NEUTRALITY, HYPOTHESIZING AND CIRCULARITY

AbstractSystems engineers who work effectively with teams of engineers and stakeholders can improve the efficiency of the overall engineering process. This paper discusses techniques that are used by human systems analysts to understand, guide and improve human interaction. Three cooperating principles: neutrality, hypothesizing and circularity, enacted through questioning strategies, are used to understand, validate and intervene in any human interaction situation. An example is given which shows how questioning with the aid of neutrality, hypothesizing and circularity can lessen a confrontational situation and improve human dialogue. A drill is also provided to help systems engineers practice and learn these techniques. If team members can learn these techniques, engineering communications problems will be lessened.

Human Rights and Policy Dialogue: A German Perspective

Human Rights and Policy Dialogue: A German Perspective

The pragmatics of friendliness and user-friendliness

The pragmatics of friendliness and user-friendliness

The 1957 Martin Buber-Carl Rogers Dialogue, as Dialogue

This study offers an understanding of human dialogue by examining a 1957 conversation between two of this century's leading proponents of dialogue, philosopher Martin Buber and psychologist Carl Rogers. The study assumes that this conversation was a dialogue (as those principally involved said it was) and asks what we can learn about dialogue through a study of this one instance. We conduct and report a close analysis of the conversation. For all the difficulties caused by the roles assigned to Buber and Rogers, the presence of two silent audiences, and the interpersonal styles of the men themselves, and despite the encounter not matching some idealized conceptions ofdialogue, this study demonstrates that dialogue is not an 'ideal possibility seldom realized" but a concretely realizable and practical accomplishment.

Health promotion in general practice

The enterprise of health promotion in medicine involves a responsibility of distinguishing between the concepts of health and absence of disease and of reflecting on the notions of illness and sickness. In this paper the importance of human dialogue is stressed both as a means and end of the doctor-patient relationship and as the main means of genuine health promotion. The outcome of health work is proposed to depend mainly on the way the patients are encountered. Their efforts to make themselves seen as being sick should not on all occasions be diagnosed and treated. By means of a reflected, dialogic practice patients may be listened to and inspired to reconstruct their symbol-based relationship to the world of meaning. The conception of health primarily includes man's relationship to himself. Illness is looked upon as the subject's experience of illhealth, whereas disease is understood as a functional imbalance of bodily organs. There is a tacit meaning in being ill (and found sick) that can be realized and attended to best in close relationship with the patient. Physicians – preferably general practitioners – involved in health promotion should, it is concluded, both assist the patients to give up their sick role and continually elaborate their own professional competence to see and successfully encounter the manifold specifically human issues underlying their patients' presented symptoms.

Spoken language in interpreted telephone dialogues

This research outlines the predominant dialogue and performance characteristics of three-person interpreted telephone speech during service-oriented dialogues, in comparison with those of two-person non-interpreted dialogues. An empirical study was conducted in which 12 native English speakers each made one telephone call through an experienced telephone interpreter to a Japanese confederate who did not speak English, and a second call to a Japanese confederate fluent in English. In total, 24 dialogues were collected, each one containing two successfully completed service tasks, or 48 tasks in total. This paper reports on comparisons performed between three-person interpreted and two-person non-interpreted speech, based on the same pool of tasks and English subjects. The unique characteristics of interpreted telephone dialogues are outlined, including structural and referential features, miscommunications and other performance characteristics, confirmatory language and linguistic indirection. In addition, an analysis is presented of interpreters' strategic management of turn shifts, and of the content, sequencing and chunking of information passed among speakers. The long-term goal of this exploratory research is the theoretical account and modeling of human dialogue, the specification of preliminary target requirements for future automatic systems, and the optimization of human performance within those systems.

Discourse structure and performance efficiency in interactive and non-interactive spoken modalities

Near-term spoken language systems will likely be limited in their interactive capabilities. To design them, we shall need to model how limitations on speaker interaction influence spoken discourse patterns in different types of tasks. Speaker interaction is a central feature of human dialogue, one presumed to have a powerful influence on its discourse structure and performance efficiency. The present study examined two speech modalities that represent opposites on the spectrum of speaker interaction—the telephone dialogue and audiotape monologue. Experts provided spontaneous instructions by either telephone or audiotape as their novice partner completed an assembly task. Within this task framework, a comprehensive analysis is provided of the basic differences in discourse organization, referential characteristics and performance efficiency for these two spoken modalities. The outlined distinctions are interpreted with special reference to the role of confirmation feedback in promoting dialogue efficiency. Implications are discussed for the design of non-interactive speech technology and limited interaction spoken language systems.

Modeling human dialogue with computers

Conversation, talk, the communicative process, can be compared to the symphonic play of a piece of music. There is an orchestra, the musicians, whose tones and notes must flow, complement and harmonize with one another. There is a main theme. As the music builds variations on the theme are played, and new themes and subthemes are introduced. The basinett responds to the strings, the bass emphasizes the mood of the violin, while the french horn adds a new melody. The subtlety and evenness of flow, the seeming simplicity of the piece, the rich interleaving of subdevelopments, variations, tangents, and recapitulations, are what make a piece of music great.

Exploiting convergence to improve natural language understanding

Convergence is the phenomenon in human dialogue whereby participants adopt characteristics of each other's speech. Communicants are unaware of this occurring. If it were possible to invoke such a phenomenon in a natural language interface it would provide a means of keeping user inputs within the range of lexical and syntactic coverage of the system, while keeping the dialogue ‘natural’ in the sense of requiring no more conscious effort in observing conventions of format than human-human dialogue. A ‘Wizard of Oz’ study was conducted to test the feasibility of this technique. Subjects were required to type queries into what they thought was a natural language database querying system. On completion of input the system presented a paraphrase for confirmation by subjects before presenting the answer. The paraphrases were constructed using particular terms and syntactic structures. Subjects began to use these terms and structures spontaneously in subsequent queries. Observation of convergence in human-computer dialogue suggests that the technique can be incorporated in user interfaces to improve communication. The implementation issues for natural language dialogue are discussed, and other applications of the technique in HCI are outlined.

Analyzing Human-Computer Dialogues in Natural Language

Human-computer dialogues in natural language will in many respects not resemble human dialogues. The main reasons for this are that there are differences in the communication channel, and also that the computer differs from a human as dialogue partner. But there are also other reasons. In this paper we first give some theoretical arguments in support of this position. It is concluded that current research in natural language and human computer interfaces needs to be supplemented by empirical studies aiming at uncovering the unique qualities of human-computer communication in natural language. In the second part we describe an environment for experiments and the results obtained. It is concluded that the main problem today is probably not syntax or speech-act capabilities, but computational methods for handling dialogue phenomena.

An interactive visual interface for FASTBUS diagnostics

Complex instruments that are not used regularly, such as diagnostic devices, are often avoided or inefficiently used because of the startup effort required to figure out how to apply them. To solve this problem, a visual interface has been developed for the SLACFASTBUS Snoop module. This interface is based on the Macintosh computer's standard human interface, using menus, dialogs, and graphics to indicate quickly the range of possibilities and allow easy setup and manipulation of the Snoop module's powerful features.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

The Language of the Heart: The Body's Response to Human Dialogue.James J. Lynch

Previous articleNext article No AccessNew Biological BooksThe Language of the Heart: The Body's Response to Human Dialogue. James J. Lynch Matthew J. FriedmanMatthew J. Friedman Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Quarterly Review of Biology Volume 61, Number 3Sep., 1986 Published in association with Stony Brook University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/415126 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 1986 Stony Brook Foundation, Inc.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Too Many Unturned Stones: A Review of The Language of the Heart: The Body's Response to Human Dialogue

Too Many Unturned Stones: A Review of <i>The Language of the Heart: The Body's Response to Human Dialogue</i>

The Language of the Heart. The Body??s Response to Human Dialogue

The Language of the Heart. The Body??s Response to Human Dialogue