Indirect Answers Research Articles

Comprehension of indirect answers: Developmental trajectory for preschool- and early elementary school-aged children with typical development.

Indirect answers are a common type of non-literal language that do not provide an explicit "yes" or "no" to a question (e.g., "I have to work late" indirectly answered "Are you going to the party?" with a negative response). In the current study, weexamined the developmental trajectory of comprehension of indirect answers among 5- to 10-year-old children with typical development.Forty-eight children, 23 boys and 25 girls, between the ages of 5 years; 0 months and 10 years; 11 months (M= 8;2,SD= 19.77 months) completed an experimental task to judge whether a verbally presented indirect answer meant yes or no (Comprehension Task) and then explain their choice (Explanation Task). Responses were scored for accuracy and coded for error analysis.On the Comprehension Task, the 5- to 8-year-oldsperformed with approximately 85% accuracy, while the 9- and 10-year-olds achieved 95% accuracy. On the Explanation Task, the cross-sectional trajectory revealed three stages: the 5- and 6-year-olds adequately explained indirect answers 32%of the time, the 7- and 8-year-olds performed significantly higher at 55%, and the 9- and 10-year-olds made significant gains than the younger children at 66%. Error analysis revealed that when children fail to interpret speaker intentions appropriately, theyrepeat the speaker's utterance or provide an insufficient explanation80% of the time. Other responses, such as those irrelevant to the context, indicating "I don't know" or no response, or that were made-up interpretations each accounted for 2%-10% of total inadequate explanations.Studyfindings indicate discrepancies between task performances and offer two separate sets of baseline data for future comparisons that investigate comprehension or explanation of indirect answers by children with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds and by those with varying cognitive and language profiles.

The Impact of the Communicative Behaviour in Social Media on the University Brand Image

Purpose: Communicative behaviour as a state of relationship which influences bilateral feelings, needs, and thoughts for more unambiguous and open communication (Ivanov & Werner, 2010) can affect the brand image. Correspondingly, communication from the side of the universities toward students through social media has a significant role.
 Facebook is a powerful communicational channel. It effectively and efficiently took control of the business sector, advertising sector, and furthermore, educational realm. It has an enduring influence on the way how people communicate, and as time passes, it becomes an essential part of their lives.
 The article presents the behaviours of Georgian higher educational institutions in social media, especially on Facebook, and the attitude of the existing or potential students towards communicative behaviour of HEIs. The findings show what kind of influence does communication in Facebook has on customer perception and correspondingly brand image.
 Study design/methodology/approach: Considering the sensitivity and nature of the research two types of studies were selected. Observing the behaviour of the universities directly on their Facebook pages was selected as the leading type of the research, since the content, as well as their responsiveness and engagement in further communication, is clearly visible visually. In addition, we have decided to listen to the customers themselves. Because of this reason focus groups of existing and potential students were selected to talk about their expectations and the reality in terms of communicative behaviour of the universities.
 Findings: The results of both, observation as well as focus group research showed the lacks and lapses of communicative behaviour of Georgian universities on social media, specifically on Facebook. The most crucial ones were detected to be the following: delays in distributing valuable information, content not so much significant and interesting for students, indirect answers to student queries or ignoring at all.
 Originality/value: Considering the globalizing landscape branding has become crucial for the universities for different reasons. Not only attracting potential students but also for retaining the existing ones and being exceptional they have to follow modern trends. Communication, direct or indirect, being one of the most significant for branding deserves more attention. The value of the current research is showing the expectations of the existing and potential customers and presents the gaps between “what is done” and “what should be done”.

A Pragmatic Analysis of Responses in Malaysian Parliamentary Discourse

This study employs the framework of responses proposed by Harris (1991), the notion of implicature as defined by Thomas (1995), and the dimensions of resistance introduced by Clayman (2001) to examine the types of responses in Malaysian Parliamentary Question Time. Analysis revealed the tendency of using direct, indirect, and evasive responses to specific questions for various reasons. Direct answers were observed in questions that could reflect positively on the government’s image. On the contrary, indirect answers were employed in questions that suggest clashing of goals between responders and questioners that could subsequently threaten the image of the government whereas negative presuppositions and the way questions are structured in parliament influence the production of evasion.Keywords: direct answer, evasive response, indirect answer, parliamentary discourse, political discourse

Косвенные ответы в естественном разговорном диалоге

By indirect answers we mean answers to general questions which do not correspond to “yes” and “no”, and answers to special questions which do not literally correlate with the question words who, what, where, etc. The article examines the types of indirect responses in different structural and semantic types of dialogue. The article analyzes the features of indirect answers determined by the predictive relationship of concepts: place-goal, place-time, etc. Particular attention is paid to answers containing assessment, not determineded by the content of questions, as well as question-answer turns with why and what for. The article focuses on the informative volume of indirect answers, their insufficiency and redundancy. Indirect questions are used rather frequently. It is not possible to classify all of them, but all of them are undoubtedly associated with certain types of dialogue, speech genres, speech situations and with the psychological type of communication partners. As noted earlier, the logical connection of the categories place-goal, placetime, goal-cause, etc. leads to reversibility and predictability of situations, and in certain speech genres to the interchangeability of designating categories in the form of indirect answers. A specific feature of the dialogue, observed in different speech genres, is the response containing the characteristic of the person mentioned in the question, instead of the information in which the speaker is interested. The analysis of these responses reveals the organic connection between the evaluation and the reason. The use of counter-questions, and first of all, why- and what for-remarks, is caused by the specific nature of this phenomenon, which, despite the thorough research of N. D. Arutyunova, allows to see some interesting features in it. The article uses recordings of oral speech and some works of fiction, reproducing spoken dialogue.

Google form in engineering mathematics: Innovation in assignment method

This research is a developmental research on the engineering mathematics assignment using google form. There are three activities observed, namely constructing, collecting and evaluating. In constructing activities, there are two criteria, namely individuals and groups. In collecting there are two forms that are observed, namely giving answers directly and indirectly. Indirectly here means by uploading the answers. In this study six types of answer uploads were observed in the form of .ppt, .doc, .xls, .pdf, .jpg and .mp4. In evaluating include two conditions, namely assessment and giving feedback. The results of this study as follows: (i) individual assignments with direct answers, namely the peer assessment, when students assess their friends during presentation session; (ii) individual tasks with indirect answers in the form of routine tasks by uploading.pdf files; (iii) group assignments with indirect answers in three forms: (iii) mini-research assignments by uploading.pdf, image, audio and video files; (iv) group discussions on working out examples by uploading presentation files and (v) project based assignment on the Mathematics application in electrical circuits by uploading .pdf files. On the individual assignment with a direct answer, students are able to see their scores soon after the submission, while for the individual and group assignments with indirect answers, the evaluation can be done within the one-week maximum. This is because the assessment must be done carefully to anticipate plagiarism and providing objective feedback.

THE ABILITY PROBLEM POSING STUDENTS POST-SOLUTION MATHEMATICAL PROBLEMS BASED ON DIFFERENCES IN LEARNING STYLE

The problem posing ability is making new questions and answers from previous information. Post-solutionis modifing a condition of problem solved to submit a new problem. Learning styles in this research is in theform of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. This descriptive research examines the ability of students to postproblem solutions based on differences in learning style involving 10 visual’s students, 12 auditory’sstudents, 9 kinesthetic’s students. Analysis of data in this research is the data reduction, data presentation,and drawing conclusions. Test material of the test is cubes. The results of the study show that ability problemsof student with visual learning styles in the form of problems that can be solved is shown clear information,changing, varying, restating, and grouping in accordance with information about previous questions, directand indirect answers are arranged in detail, language structure questions in the form of assignment andconditional propositions are shown clear commands, difficulty of easy and moderate difficulty levels inquestion answer. The ability to submit students’ problems in auditory learning styles in the form of problemsthat can be solved is shown clear information, changing, varying, and restating in accordance withinformation about previous questions, direct and indirect answers according to the systematic, assignmentand conditional propositions according clear problem commands, easy and moderate difficulty levels onquestion answer. The ability to propose problems of kinesthetic learning styles of students in the form ofquestions can be solved by manipulating the conditions of the problem, changing, varying, and restarting bymanipulating the previous problem, direct and indirect answers according to clear command, assignment andconditional propositions by manipulating the command of the questions , difficulties are easy and moderatearranged in detail.

The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union, Diana Dumitru

Reviewed by: The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union by Diana Dumitru Ion Popa The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union. By Diana Dumitru. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 300 pages. $31.99 (paper). Diana Dumitru’s book offers provocative insight and indirect answers to some of the most important questions posed by the millennial problem of antisemitism: what is antisemitism; can it be resisted in a meaningful and successful way; and, how can one explain that antisemitism differs in intensity across the European continent? This highly original study looks at two regions that share important similarities and differences. Although Bessarabia and Transnistria have been central to writings about the Holocaust in Romania (see the work of Jean Ancel, Avigdor Shachan, Dalia Offer, Dennis Deletant, Radu Ioanid, and others), we have not had a comparative study of antisemitic attitudes in these regions until now. The book starts with details about the levels of antisemitism in both Bessarabia and Transnistria before the First World War. These territories had been under Tsarist rule (Bessarabia was annexed to Russia in 1812) for almost the entire nineteenth century. Diana Dumitru contrasts examples of Russian antisemitism—such as those expressed by the central administration and by cultural figures such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Gogol—with examples from [End Page 190] Bessarabian and Transnistrean writers and journalists. She also examines intellectual circles that fought against the state-supported anti semitic campaign, including the creators of the 1890 “Declaration of V. S. Solov’ev,” signed by Leo Tolstoy among others, that protested the regime’s oppression of Jews. This first chapter draws arguments from a variety of places, from numerous archival materials to a multitude of secondary sources, in languages as varied as French, Russian, English, and Romanian. Later in the book the author uses the extensive archival collections of Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the state archives of Romania, Moldova, and Russia. Especially noteworthy is the use of numerous testimonies from both Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and non-Jewish inhabitants of these territories, some of them gathered by the author herself. At the end of the First World War, Bessarabia became part of Romania, while Transnistria became part of the Soviet Union (Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic). The territory of Transnistria is very different today than it was during the Second World War— the book focuses on the war-time territory, which was approximately the size of today’s state of Moldova in southeastern Ukraine. In Romania, the interwar period was a time of increased nationalism and antisemitism, while the Soviet Union was pushing for the concept of korenizatsiia—or indigenization—geared toward promoting “national equality” and “friendship of the peoples.” Diana Dumitru’s book asks whether this difference in state policy and public discourse explains the later differences in behavior toward Jews in the two regions. In the following chapters the evolution of Jewish-Gentile relations in Bessarabia and Transnistria is examined. First, the author describes the way in which Bessarabian Jews were treated in Greater Romania, where there was a combination of state-encouraged anti-Jewish policies on the one hand and grassroots continuation of pre-WWI antisemitism on the other. In fact, grassroots antisemitism became even stronger in Romania after 1918 in a context in which the state, which was mostly governed by ethnic Romanians, favored a centralized model alienating the ethnic and religious minorities [End Page 191] added as a result of the Great Union. This was coupled with the intense intellectual debates that legitimized Orthodox Christianity as the core element of Romanian nationalism and encouraged the antisemitic actions of rightwing parties and movements such as the Iron Guard and the National Christian Defense League (often called Cuziști, after the name of its founder A. C. Cuza). The book then moves to Transnistria, where the story was substantially different. The newly established communist regime intended to end centuries of discrimination and conflict between various ethnic groups by integrating them into a new socialist society under the leadership of the Communist Party. This intention was visible immediately in...

Improving Estimation Accuracy in Non\-randomized Response Questioning Methods by Multiple Answers

When private or stigmatizing characteristics are included in sample surveys, direct questions result in low cooperation of the respondents. To increase cooperation, indirect questioning procedures have been established in the literature. Nonrandomized response methods are one group of such procedures and have attracted much attention in recent years. In this article, we consider four popular nonrandomized response schemes and present a possibility to improve the estimation precision of these schemes. The basic idea is to require multiple indirect answers from each respondent. We develop a Fisher scoring algorithm for the maximum likelihood estimation in the presented new schemes and show the better efficiency of the new schemes compared with the original designs.

Improving Estimation Accuracy in Nonrandomized Response Questioning Methods by Multiple Answers

When private or stigmatizing characteristics are included in sample surveys, direct questions result in low cooperation of the respondents. To increase cooperation, indirect questioning procedures have been established in the literature. Nonrandomized response methods are one group of such procedures and have attracted much attention in recent years. In this article, we consider four popular nonrandomized response schemes and present a possibility to improve the estimation precision of these schemes. The basic idea is to require multiple indirect answers from each respondent. We develop a Fisher scoring algorithm for the maximum likelihood estimation in the presented new schemes and show the better efficiency of the new schemes compared with the original designs.

Pragmatic question answering: A game-theoretic approach

We present results of quantitative evaluations of a content selection scheme for answer generation in sales dialogue which is based on an interactive game-theoretic model of the dialogue scenario. The model involves representing a probability distribution over possible customer requirements, i.e., needs that must be met before a customer will agree to buy an object. Through game-theoretic analysis we derive a content selection procedure which constitutes an optimal strategy in the dialogue game. This procedure is capable of producing pragmatically appropriate indirect answers to yes/no questions, and is implemented in an online question answering system. Evaluation results show that these answers are pragmatically natural and contribute to dialogue efficiency. The model allows for systems that learn probabilities of customer requirements, both online and from previous data.

A Hybrid Architectural Approach to Understanding and Appropriately Generating Indirect Speech Acts

Current approaches to handling indirect speech acts (ISAs) do not account for their sociolinguistic underpinnings (i.e., politeness strategies). Deeper understanding and appropriate generation of indirect acts will require mechanisms that integrate natural language (NL) understanding and generation with social information about agent roles and obligations,which we introduce in this paper. Additionally, we tackle the problem of understanding and handling indirect answers that take the form of either speech acts or physical actions, which requires an inferential, plan-reasoning approach. In order to enable artificial agents to handle an even wider-variety of ISAs, we present a hybrid approach, utilizing both the idiomatic and inferential strategies. We then demonstrate our system successfully generating indirect requests and handling indirect answers, and discuss avenues of future research.

Why ask?

In this paper we address the problem. “What makes an answer appropriate?” We do so by investigating indirect answers to questions in task‐oriented dialogues. Three cases are distinguished: (1) The response, though indirect, answers the question asked; (2) the response denies a presupposition of the question; and (3) the response answers to higher goals the questioner was trying to achieve. Detailed analysis shows the need for knowledge about the task, the role of the pariticipants, and communication goals, in the construction of appropriate answers. We conclude with a preliminary formulation of the appropriateness of an answer in terms of the goals of the questioner and the knowledge of the respondent.

THE EARLY TREATMENT OF CANCER

An important phase of any discussion of cancer is the campaign of education, which aims to make progress by wider utilization of the facts already at hand regarding the disease rather than by relying on the development of new procedures to increase the number of our cures. We already have sufficient knowledge to alleviate the suffering of many times the number of victims that we help at the present time, yet how much cancer do we cure? How soon does the average case become hopeless? How late are we when we ordinarily attack the disease, and therefore how much or how little chance will a given individual have? These are pertinent questions, unfortunately susceptible of only indirect answers; but they indicate the extent of the problem before us and, as such, should demand our attention. The cancer problem of a community is not how many operative cures have been reported