Request Strategies Research Articles

Adolescents’ use of influence tactics with parents in family travel decision making: A cross-societal comparison in Eastern Europe

ABSTRACTWe aim to present a cross-societal comparison of the influence tactics that adolescents use with their parents in family travel decisions by investigating 762 usable responses of senior high school students across four Eastern Europe societies (Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Slovakia). Through multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MG-CFA), adolescent influence behavior emerges in a refined and validated model of four subscales reflecting bargaining, persuasion, emotional, and request strategies. These subscales indicate the measurement invariance of adolescent influence behavior across societies. Our findings show significant between-society differences for all four dimensions of adolescents’ influence tactics with their parents. Furthermore, respondents from all four societies have similar priorities of choosing their influence tactics, as reported in recent studies on family purchase decisions. We also found that respondents from the non-post-Soviet cluster (NPSC) are more likely to apply various influence tactics than their counterparts from the post-Soviet cluster (PSC). We conclude with a discussion of these differences and why they may have occurred.

Speech Acts of Requests: A Case of Indonesian EFL Learners

<p><em>This study sheds light on the delineation of the most frequently used request strategies as realized by Indonesian EFL learners and their reasons of utilizing such strategies. A descriptive qualitative study was employed by involving forty (40) English learners of a university at Surakarta as the participants. The data were gathered by means of DCT-questionnaire, Role-plays, and Focus Group Discussion (FGD). The obtained data were descriptively analyzed by referring to Blum-Kulka and Olshtain’s Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP) followed by transcribing the result of FGD. The findings illustrated that Indonesian EFL learners made use of conventionally indirect request more frequently than other strategies. Furthermore, the FGD revealed that their reasons of employing conventionally indirect strategy were because of the cultural factors and the social distance between the interlocutors. As an effort to equip EFL learners with adequate pragmatic competence, this study offers some input enhancement both in terms of process (teaching activities) and in terms of product (realizing speech act of requests) for ELT practices in Indonesian context.</em><em></em></p>

Speech Act Classification and Request Strategy in “Tall Girl” Movie Directed by Nzingha Stewart

The research is aimed to find out the speech act classification and types of request strategy from a dialogue of the characters in Tall Girl movie. The method of this study is descriptive qualitative analysis. Data is taken out of all dialogues of the characters and is observed by using theories. In this analysis, the writers found the speech Act Classification and Types of Request Strategy in the Speech Act. The speech act is classified in declaration, representatives, directives, commissives, and expressive. Directives served the dominant form among the five types of illocutionary act mostly expressed their utterance. And as request strategy is typed in mood derivable, explicit performative, hedged performative, locution derivable, want statement, suggestive formula and preparatory. Mood derivable served the dominant form among the other types to deliver their willingness.

A Cross-cultural Comparative Study of Requests Made in Chinese by South Korean and French Learners

This study aims to examine the differences of pragmatic strategies of requests made in Chinese by South Korean and French learners, in comparison to those made by Chinese native speakers (CNS). Using a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) questionnaire as the research tool, 20 Chinese, 20 French students and 20 South Korean students from the Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) were randomly selected to complete the questionnaire. The response data from the Chinese student questionnaires were used as the baseline data for comparison as well as generating a modified coding scheme. The results show that Chinese speakers and South Korean learners tend to be more direct by using “query preparatory” and “mood derivable” as head acts, while French learners tend to be indirect by primarily using “query preparatory.” In terms of sociopragmatics, the results show that Korean learners and Chinese tend to be hierarchical and collectivistic, while French students are prone to be egalitarian and individualistic. L2 transfer, inductive/deductive mindset, unfamiliarity, and varied perceptions of politeness could be possible reasons for the differences in request strategies. This study concludes with suggestions for future research and pedagogy.

Pragmatic Awareness of Iraqi undergraduate EFL Learners in using Request Strategies

Pragmatic Awareness of Iraqi undergraduate EFL Learners in using Request Strategies

Scheduling Dynamic Multicast Requests in Advance Reservation Environment for Enterprise Video Conferencing Systems

In an enterprise video conferencing system, the enterprise network can be shared by hundreds of video conferences. On the other hand, participants may not arrive at the same time and stay until the end of the conference. The abilities to reserve resources in advance, as well as effective dynamic multicast when participants can join and leave the conference at any time, are essential in the distributed multi-party video conferencing systems. However, the effective advance reservation strategies of the dynamic multicast requests for a heavy traffic case still remains open. In this paper, we investigate the problem of Maximizing the number of admitted Dynamic Multicast requests in the Advance Reservation environment (MDMAR) for the enterprise video conferencing system. We take two path schemes of a fixed path and variable paths, as well as a heterogeneous bandwidth reservation model into account. Firstly, we prove that the MDMAR problem is NP-complete and formulate it mathematically as an integer linear program (ILP) for small networks. Then, we develop greedy algorithms and simulated annealing (SA) algorithms for enterprise networks. Comparative simulations are performed to evaluate the heuristic algorithms for both small networks and enterprise networks. We find that the SA algorithms can provide within 6% lower optimal solutions than the ILP algorithms for our small network, and up to 10% improvement over the greedy algorithms for the large campus or enterprise network.

A Bandwidth-Aware Video Segments Request Strategy to Optimize User’s QoE in Connected Vehicle Networks

In ITS environment, the driver-assistant services usually demand delivering video content to vehicular users, which is very useful in the intervention of emergency services, and reminds the drivers the traffic jam in ahead road. Nowadays for online video delivery in connected vehicle networks, HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS) is one of the most promising technologies, where a video is encoded into multiple bitrates and then split into small segments. It is crux for ITS service providers how to improve users' QoE through an adaptive video segments request strategy. From the perspective of adaptive matching among segment bitrate, network bandwidth, and buffer occupancy, we propose a bandwidth-aware video segment request strategy to optimize user's QoE (for short Bw-QoE), which consists of two parts, i.e., available bandwidth estimation, and segment's bitrate selection. First, based on the severity of bandwidth fluctuation, Bw-QoE estimates the available bandwidth with different historical weighted average methods. Then constrained by the estimated available bandwidth and buffer occupancy, the adaptive bitrate selection is formulated as an optimization model to maximize user's QoE of a video streaming session. It is fairly attractive for Bw-QoE to prevent buffer overflow, underflow and unuseful download, and to reduce bitrate switching. Compared with the classic strategy (e.g., LIU's strategy), the simulation results show that the proposed strategy Bw-QoE has higher average video bitrate (about 8%-10%), less interruption (about 100%), less segment bitrate switching (about 15%-17%) and higher buffer occupancy (about 13%-51%), which demonstrate that our strategy effectively improves QoE.

Participation of patients in healthcare security: a systematic review

The scope of this article was to identify the strategies used for the participation of the patient in healthcare security in hospital and outpatient environments. It involved a systematic review of the literature based on the recommendations of the PRISMA model on the Scopus, WOS and Medline databases. The search was restricted to studies written in Portuguese, English or Spanish conducted between January 2001 and July 2016. Observational, descriptive, qualitative and/or epidemiological studies that described a development/appliance methodology using at least one patient security improvement strategy of inclusion were included. The methodological quality of the studies was assessed using the randomized Cochrane risk-of-bias tool. Thematic analyses were performed in order to analyze the results. After the application of criteria of title, abstract analysis and exclusion, 19 studies were selected. In these studies, patient security strategies that promoted patients' active participation on patient security and information request strategies were identified. In the literature, sundry strategies promoting patient participation on healthcare security, with concrete implementation methods, as well as distinct purposes for their use, were encountered.

AI-Based Request Augmentation to Increase Crowdsourcing Participation

To support the massive data requirements of modern supervised machine learning (ML) algorithms, crowdsourcing systems match volunteer contributors to appropriate tasks. Such systems learn what types of tasks contributors are interested to complete. In this paper, instead of focusing on what to ask, we focus on learning how to ask: how to make relevant and interesting requests to encourage crowdsourcing participation. We introduce a new technique that augments questions with ML-based request strategies drawn from social psychology. We also introduce a contextual bandit algorithm to select which strategy to apply for a given task and contributor. We deploy our approach to collect volunteer data from Instagram for the task of visual question answering (VQA), an important task in computer vision and natural language processing that has enabled numerous human-computer interaction applications. For example, when encountering a user’s Instagram post that contains the ornate Trevi Fountain in Rome, our approach learns to augment its original raw question “Where is this place?” with image-relevant compliments such as “What a great statue!” or with travel-relevant justifications such as “I would like to visit this place”, increasing the user’s likelihood of answering the question and thus providing a label. We deploy our agent on Instagram to ask questions about social media images, finding that the response rate improves from 15.8% with unaugmented questions to 30.54% with baseline rule-based strategies and to 58.1% with ML-based strategies.

Request Strategies in the TV Series <i>Victorious</i>

This research aimed to investigate request strategies as found in an American TV series Victorious. In particular, it attempted to identify and classify request head acts, external modifications, and types of sentences of the requests expressed by the characters in the series. Therefore, utterances containing requests in the TV series were used as the data of this study. The results show that the most frequently used request strategy in the TV series was direct strategy (mood derivable) with 194 occurrences (67%). In addition, an external modification by means of grounder was found to be the most frequent strategy in the TV series with 32 occurrences (94% of the total number of the external modifications). Furthermore, it was found that the imperative sentence was the most frequent type of sentence utilized by the characters in the series when making requests with 216 occurrences (74%). In conclusion, the tendency for the characters to use mood derivable as their request strategy might due to their intimacy with each character and the informal situations and conversations where they interacted with each other throughout the TV series. In addition, the proclivity of the characters to use grounder may relate to ease and simplicity. Finally, the tendency of the characters to use declarative sentences when making requests might due to its simplicity and function to state facts, opinions, or ideas.

Request Strategies in the American TV Series <i>Full House</i>

This research aims to analyze the request strategies used in an American TV Series entitled Full House season 7 episodes 1-12. The main characters are family members from three different age groups (adult, teenager, and children). This research attempts to see if there is any difference on the choice of request strategies used by the three age groups. Blum-Kulka and Olshtain’s (1984) theory on request directness level is used to classify the requests. Relative power and social distance are also studied to see how they influence the characters in making their requests. The results show that mood derivable is the most frequent strategy used by all age groups. Specifically, direct request is highly used by the adult age groups. On the other hand, indirect request is mostly used by the younger age groups. The results also show that all age groups tend to use direct strategy when the social distance is negative. However, when the social distance is positive, the choice of strategy depends on the authority of the speaker.

IMPERATIVES IN HOTEL SERVICE ENCOUNTERS: THE CASE OF JORDANIAN LEARNERS OF ENGLISH

This paper examines the language of requests among the hotel trainees in Jordan. It seeks to explore the ways in which the trainees employ requestive strategies at the service counter in managing interpersonal and cross-cultural communication. Specifically, it discusses the Jordanian trainees' use of imperative requests compared with native speakers hotel staff and relates any divergences to politeness and cultural factors. The data collected include conversations between the trainees and hotel guests. The findings demonstrate that trainees rely more on imperative constructions and they favour conventional imperatives more than any other types. The findings also reveal that the trainees deviate from the native speakers' performance in terms of volume and types of strategies used. Some of these deviations may be due to Arabic language influence, pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic transfer or to insufficient linguistic and pragmatic competences. Article visualizations:

Game-Theory Based Power and Spectrum Virtualization for Optimizing Spectrum Efficiency in Mobile Cloud-Computing Wireless Networks

Mobile cloud-computing is a wireless network environment that focuses on sharing the publicly available wireless resources. Wireless network virtualization provides an efficient technique to implement the mobile cloud-computing by enabling multiple virtual wireless networks to be mapped onto one physical substrate wireless network. One of the most important challenges of this technique lies in how to efficiently allocate the wireless resources of physical wireless networks to the multiple virtual wireless network users. To overcome these difficulties, in this paper we propose a set of novel game-theory based schemes to resolve the wireless resources allocation problem in terms of transmit power and wireless spectrum. We formulate this wireless resources allocation problem as the gaming process where each mobile user bids for the limited wireless resources from physical substrate wireless networks, and competes with the other mobile-user players bidding for the same resources. Under our proposed game-theory framework, we develop three types of wireless resources request strategies: price-based strategy, correlation-based strategy, and water-filling-based strategy to allocate wireless resources under three different gaming mechanisms. The extensive simulation results obtained validate and evaluate our proposed schemes.

Free Radiation and Mass Transfer Effects on Mhd Convection Flow Along a Moving Vertical Porous Plate with Suction And Chemical Reaction in Presence of Soret and Dufour Effects

The paper discusses the take a look at of the Radiation and chemical response of the moving vertical permeable plate embedded in a permeable medium at the MHD boundary layer by taking into consideration the impacts of Soret and Dufour and the heat source. Equations supervise the flow are coupled andunraveled numerically utilizing Runge - Kutta fourth request strategy and Newton Raphson shooting method. The impact of different controlling Parameters on the speed, temperature, cognizance, pores and skin-rubbing coefficient, Nusselt range and Sherwood range are pointed out in detail. The findings are compared with available data obtained through analytical procedures and found to be in concurrent with the latter.

Surveying pragmatic performance during a study abroad stay: A cross-sectional look at the language of spoken requests

This paper documents a cross-sectional look at L1 transfer and L2 contact for learners of English in a UK study abroad (SA) context. The study employed an instructional experimental design over a 6-month period with 34 Chinese students assigned to either an explicitly instructed group or a control group receiving no instruction. Instruction took place prior to departure for the UK and performance was measured based on a pretest-posttest design using an oral computer-animated production test (CAPT). This paper explores the data in two specific ways. Firstly, the request data were analysed at the pre-and delayed test stages (six months into the study abroad period) to analyse the extent to which participants’ reliance on L1 request strategies and language changes over time. Secondly, we measured the amount and type of contact with English which participants reported prior to and six months into the study abroad period. Results show that instruction facilitated development of pragmatically appropriate request language over time, with instructed learners showing significantly less reliance on L1 transfer than non-instructed learners. Contact with English increased significantly for both groups on all measures of language production but not all receptive contact with English. When compared, there was no significant difference between the groups’ contact with English at each stage, suggesting that instruction did not result in significantly more interaction with English during the study abroad period.

Game theory-based optimization of distributed idle computing resources in cloud environments

With the rapid cloud technological advancement and economic growth, more and more organizations have purchased cloud resources for daily business operations besides building their own IT infrastructures. Thus, it is very important to understand the economy of cloud computing. In this paper, we mainly focus on examining the private idle computing resources owned by various organizations who are willing to form a network of ad hoc cloud provider and sell the services to cloud users. In such a case, the organizations cannot only meet their own demands, but also sell their idle computing resources in the form of ad hoc cloud. Naturally, the organizations, as provider, aim at maximizing their own profit through adjusting business costs and sale prices. Due to the uncertainty of the amount of idle computing resources, dynamic pricing is challenging. We approach the problem from the perspective of game theory and formulate it as a non-cooperative game among multiple organizations, i.e., the game player. For each player, a utility function is used to represent its profits. The players choose request strategies and sales service strategies to maximize the utility function. This paper has proved that there exists Nash equilibrium for this game problem. We proposed an iterative proximal algorithm (IPA) for calculating the Nash equilibrium. After analyzing the convergence of the IPA, we found that the algorithm converges to the Nash equilibrium solution when reasonable conditions are satisfied and conforms to the theoretical proof. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm can quickly converge to a stable state, and by calculating the appropriate service (resource) request strategies and selling service strategies for all organizations, organizations' profit are increased compared to without IPA algorithm.

Überzeugungs- und Überredungsmittel in mündlichen Aufforderungsakten im deutsch-italienischen Sprachvergleich

The purpose of this study is to draw a comparison between the realization of requestive speech acts in Italian and in German, and to investigate the different strategies of persuasion in the two speech communities, with a particular attention to the relationship between efficiency and politeness.
 The empirical part of the study consists in the comparison of 320 requests formulated by Italian and German speakers. Linguistic data were elicited by means of a discourse completion test containing four socio-pragmatic situations. Realizations of requests were analysed according to the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project’s (CCSARP) Coding Manual, reported in Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989), and discussed at two levels: the cross cultural variation and the situational variation.
 Results show that both groups of participants are perfectly aware of the differences between the situations proposed and tailor their requests according to the context. It is found that both groups of subjects rely heavily on conventionally indirect strategies. On the whole, German speakers appear to use more indirect request strategies than their Italian counterparts, and at the same time choose with a higher frequency phrasal, lexical and syntactical modificators. Italian speakers tend to select slightly lower levels of indirectness but compensate with a consistently larger use of external modificators. Moreover, both Italian and German speakers seem to recur more often to strategies of Überzeugung, probably because the most used modificator for both groups of respondents is the Grounder.
 Our results differ in interesting ways from general expectations in the situation in which the face threat is arguably the highest, calling for further investigation of the difference in the perception of the social parameters determining the rated face threat between the two speech communities. Deeper insights into the link between indirectness and politeness in the two cultures at issue are also needed in order to understand the reasons behind the pragmatic choices observed.

Request Balancing Among Users in Multiple Autonomous Cloud Provider Environments

As an increasing number of providers are offering cloud service reservations, an increasingly competitive market has emerged. While most of these providers charge users for metered usage based on fixed prices, they cannot make a timely response to demand changes and may risk losing users. Hence, we highlight the importance of an autonomous provider who self-adjusts the price according to the latest demands of the cloud market. Extensive research has shown that this is not a problem for a single provider. However, when it comes to multiple providers, the main challenge is coordinating the interactions between users and users, providers and providers, as well as users and providers. In this paper, we focus on request balancing among users in the multiple-autonomous-provider environment. Since the request strategy and payment of each user are affected by decisions of other users, we take game theory to address this problem and formulate it into a noncooperative game among multiple users, without sharing specific strategies. Each user tries to maximize its utility, which combines the net profit with time efficiency. The variational inequality theory is employed and proved that there exists a Nash equilibrium solution set for the game. Then, an iterative proximal algorithm is proposed to find the Nash equilibrium solution, and its convergence is proven. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme makes requests balanced and increases users' utilities, and also shifts demands from peak to off-peak periods.

Evolutionary game analysis on competition strategy choice of application providers

SummaryModern smartphone platforms offer a multitude of useful features to their users, but at the same time, they highly affect privacy, which may lead to unnecessary personal data being collected. In this paper, we proposed an evolutionary game model to study permission request strategies of the bounded rational application providers. We study the proposed model with detailed simulations. Initial results demonstrate that evolution processes are influenced by four factors: revenue increase ratio, market share, credit cost, and market attraction. It also suggests that establishing a privacy alarm mechanism not only can improve the users' privacy awareness but also decrease the market share when providers over‐request permissions and push them request permissions properly.

Lexical and morpho-syntactic modification of student requests: An empirical contribution to the study of (im)politeness in French e-mail speech acts

Despite considerable attention to the politeness of French requests, to date, no study has been devoted to the lexical variation within one and the same politeness strategy. In an attempt to overcome this shortcoming, this paper addresses lexical and morphosyntactic modification in university students’ requests to lecturers. On the basis of a corpus of 150 French students’ request e-mails, it is observed, on the one hand, that a large majority of requests include lexical items that mitigate the face-threat entailed by the request speech act. This is somewhat surprising, as the context in which these requests are grounded entails a weak degree of threat to the negative face of the recipient lecturer. On the other hand, unlike the politeness marker please, the terms of address that characterize formal communication are not systematically present. The results of this corpus analysis demonstrate that, even though a limited number of request strategies are used by students, the wording of their e-mails contains some degree of lexical variation in their choice of verbs and their use of lexical items to modify their requests. I also propose a naturalistic method consisting in eliciting e-mail speech acts, which avoids the downsides of semi-controlled production tasks.