Oral Dialogue Research Articles

Assessing students' communicativecompetence using a linguistic analysis procedure

Forms of nonformal assessment of children's language and literacy development in classrooms are being sought more urgently now due to the growing realization that formal measurement forms often reveal little of value to a classroom teacher trying to plan a student-responsive curriculum in the face of sometimes widespread literacy failure. One such possible form of assessment is cohesion analysis, a type of linguistically based text analysis created by Halliday and Hasan, not typically used in assessment of students, teachers, and materials. The results of two studies on dialogue, both oral and written, as revealed by cohesion analysis, are presented and analyzed within the framework of the development by children, including Afro-Americans and Appalachians, of a register repertoire which includes learning to read. Cohesion analysis did reveal similarities and differences in oral dialogue, written dialogue, and between the two modes. One finding was that teacher's talk and the dialogue in basal primers was similar to one another but different from first graders' talk, mother-child dialogue, and the dialogue in children's storybooks. Instructional implications of the findings are presented, and a case for the viability of cohesion analysis as a comprehensive language assessment tool is made.

The use of the Dempster-Shafer rule in the lexical component of a man-machine oral dialogue system

Most difficulties arising in the development of speech understanding systems come from the great uncertainty inherent in the acoustic signal. The inaccuracy of acoustic-phonetic decoders makes it necessary to use higher level information: lexical, syntactic and semantic. We present here a possible solution for integrating some of this information in the particular case of an administrative database questioning system.First, we try to sketch how contextual knowledge can be extracted from local or global representations of an utterance, such as partial recognition or the dialogue history in the case of man-machine interaction.Then, we focus on the production of lexical hypotheses in top-down analysis, within the framework of a system architecture based on the cooperation of independent modules.We apply the Dempster-Shafer formalism in order to combine information in the lexicon, using a frequency distribution as the basis for evidence evaluation. This mathematical rule has suitable properties in the case of an oral dialogue system, as it preserves module autonomy and allows backtracking at any time during the recognition process.This approach seems promising in as much as it helps speech recognition converge faster to a satisfactory solution, thanks to linguistic information.

A MULTILINGUAL APPROACH TO TASK-ORIENTED MAN-MACHINE DIALOGUE BY VOICE

In the framework of man-machine communication, oral dialogue has a particular place since human speech presents several advantages when used either alone or in multimedia interfaces. The last decade has witnessed a proliferation of research into speech recognition and understanding, but few systems have been defined with a view to managing and understanding an actual man-machine dialogue. The PARTNER system that we describe in this paper proposes a solution in the case of task oriented dialogue with the use of artificial languages. A description of the essential characteristics of dialogue systems is followed by a presentation of the architecture and the principles of the PARTNER system. Finally, we present the most recent results obtained in the oral management of electronic mail in French and German.

The Critical Reprocessing of Andrew Marvell

Marshall McLuhan points out in Understanding Media that the content of a new medium is a reprocessed old medium. For instance, when writing was new, Plato transformed the old oral dialogue into an art form' or more currently, the film has reprocessed plays and novels. The principle is an interesting one, but it needs refinement: no medium shows a more voracious appetite than Critical Commentary. Yet it is not a late arrival that devours selected predecessors; it is ancient and eats everything. Also, the collision of media, as one cannibalizes others that resist it, make them self-consciously critical themselves, so that criticism turns them into metathings, or their own first treatises. (It also threatens to devour itself, like the serpent its own tail, but that is another matter.) We have become more aware in all this upsurge of criticism that poems absorb a good many things, including earlier poems, ideas and images, topics, genres, and common language. The modernizing of Marvell has proceeded accordingly and has pondered not only how Marvell pulls things into his poetic universe but what sort of criticism his poems implicitly ask for and are. It is the recent work of the three-hundredth anniversary of his death that concerns us here. We should perhaps acknowledge at the outset that each phase of the critical appraisal of Marvell has produced substantial differences of opinion, the tercentenary commemoration included. When we read documents in the history of Marvell commentary chronologically, as Elizabeth Donno has conveniently arranged them,2 we find (as several people have recently pointed out) that earlier critics presented very partial versions of him. They ignored the lyric poet almost entirely and even the verse satirist and saw primarily the prose satirist and patriot whom Swift admired and emulated. Not until the earlier nineteenth century did the lyric Marvell emerge, and not really until Grierson and Eliot