Spoken Dialogue Research Articles

Triggers for reflection in undergraduate clinical nursing education: A qualitative descriptive study

BackgroundReflection is a key component of effective teaching in baccalaureate nursing education. However, there are limited empirical studies into the factors which trigger reflection in undergraduate clinical nursing education. ObjectivesThis study aimed to explore reflection triggers in undergraduate clinical nursing education with a specific focus on verbalized reflection in spoken dialogues. MethodsThis qualitative descriptive study was conducted in 2017–2018. Participants were seventeen clinical nursing instructors, 32 nursing students, and nine newly graduated nurses who were purposively recruited from four universities and two hospitals in Iran. Data were collected via 26 in-depth semi-structured face-to-face interviews with clinical nursing instructors and newly graduated nurses and four focus group discussions with students. Conventional content analysis was used for data analysis. ResultsReflection triggers fell into the following four main categories: conscious comparison of actions, confrontation with influential realities, emotional and moral involvement in patient care, and demanding accountability. ConclusionThis study suggests triggers for reflection in clinical nursing education. Instructors' use of reflection triggers can help students reflect on their actions and practice.

Revista: Conversación sin barreras by José A. Blanco

Reviewed by: Revista: Conversación sin barrerasby José A. Blanco Ada Ortúzar-Young Blanco, José A. Revista: Conversación sin barreras. Instructor's Annotated Edition. 5thEdition. Vista Higher Learning, 2018. Pp. 217. ISBN 978-1-68005-042-4. The new edition of this well-established Advanced Conversation program continues to offer a wealth of materials for both instructors and students. The revised edition has replaced some "cortometrajes" and "lecturas" but the textbook maintains the old format and most of its content. [End Page 292]The "Supersite"—the online resources and course management system—also has been enhanced. As in previous editions, each of the six lessons centers on a topic: "¿Realidad o fantasía?," "Una cuestión de personalidad," "La influencia de los medios," "Las garras del poder," "Misterios del amor," and "Modos de vivir." Overall, they offer thematic variety that appeal to students and is conducive to class discussions on a diversity of opinions. Each lesson can be broadly divided into three categories that lend themselves to different pedagogical approaches. Each contributes in its own way to advance language skills and cultural awareness. One centers on authentic materials: a "cortometraje," various "lecturas," and a "tira cómica." Each of these are units in themselves and the instructor may choose to use all of them, or not, and opt to alter the sequence in which they are presented in the textbook. They are well planned and useful to the instructor and the students. Of particular value is the fact that these authentic materials are selected from many regions in the Hispanic world, bridging Spain and the Americas, in such a way that they provide students with authentic cultural variety and regional nuances of the language throughout the Spanish-speaking world. They also serve to introduce students to the reading of literature and to popular culture, which is provided by the "tiras cómicas" and the films. Each of the authentic materials unit contains introductory exercises that consist of a set of pre-reading and pre-viewing, useful vocabulary for this particular assigment, and brief information on the author. They are followed by the "Análisis," a series of exercises that range from comprehension and interpretation to topics meant to amplify the themes. They end with suggestions to work in pairs or small groups. A second category is devoted to a rapid review of those grammatical points that are most relevant to the materials presented. And lastly, each chapter wraps up with topics for a composition and for a "tertulia," thus giving the student ample opportunities to create both orally and in writing. Harnessing the latest technologies to enhance the teaching and learning experience is an essential component of any teaching program today. Revista's "Supersite" has many useful features for the instructor to manage and customize the course, such as creating quizzes, incorporating outside links and resources, grading tools, giving assignments online, and modifying the content with personalized notes. It also offers a communication center for the instructors to post messages as well as for students to communicate online with the instructor. For the students, the "Supersite" offers seamless integration with the textbook. Icons throughout the textbook point out to the features available online. The cost-conscious students, as well as those who prefer not to carry a hard copy, may purchase the online version of the textbook, which is also iPad friendly in the 5th edition. The "Supersite" brings the textbook to life with sounds and movements. Longer versions of the "cortometrajes" are provided, and students can immerse themselves in the Hispanic culture with sights and the spoken dialogue. Each lesson also includes an audio MP3 file of a reading of one of the "lecturas" with several options for the students depending on their level of comprehension of the spoken language. They may opt to listen to the reading as they follow the written text, or assess their comprehension of the language by just listing to it. Likewise, each word or phrase in the vocabulary section is read out loud which allows student to zero in the pronunciation of vowels and consonants, thus allowing them to refine their pronunciation. The exercises in the textbook also appear...

Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama by Eleanor Johnson

Reviewed by: Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama by Eleanor Johnson Clifford Davidson (bio) Eleanor Johnson. Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Middle English Prose, Verse, and Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. Viii + 254. Hardbound $90; Paperback $30.00. Eleanor Johnson grapples with the practices of meditation and participation in three late medieval plays from East Anglia—the so-called Mary Play embedded in the N-Town manuscript (British Library Cotton MS. Vespasian D.8, fols. 37v–74), Wisdom, and Mankind (both of them included in the Macro Manuscript, Folger Shakespeare Library MS. 5031, fols. 38–121, 122–34)—as well as in the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing, Julian of Norwich's A Revelation of Love, and Langland's Piers Plowman, the latter more extensively studied recently by Curtis A. Gruenler (Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma, 2017). With regard to the plays under discussion, Johnson chooses a "shift of focus" in arguing for them as contemplative and participatory so far as they "in part perform that contemplation in the formal apparatuses of the literary field" (6). In this she makes the choice of turning away from consideration of "visuality" to "aural experience," thus challenging the dominant view of main-line fifteenth-century culture in England as being notably of the eye as a channel for devotion and "truth." In her analysis of the Mary Play, Johnson calls attention to Nicholas Love's defense of meditative texts in his early fifteenth-century Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, an adaptation for "symple soules" of the Latin Meditatione Vitae Christi formerly attributed to St. Bonaventure. Love's goal was to "make present" (i.e., visible to "devoute ymaginacions") the scenes of Jesus's life and to encourage participation in them, to be "rauyshede to loue" of God (quoting from Michael Sargent's best-text edition). To participate imaginatively in these scenes (as if in a play) involved meditation on them as refashioned from the Bible and other sources. (For the Mary Play the sources are identified in the notes in Stephen Spector's standard edition of the N-Town Play, a crucial reference not cited in Johnson's bibliography.) Love encouraged a method close to the practice of monastic reading, which must have been familiar to him since he was a Carthusian prior whose semi-eremetical contemplative order was particularly devoted to contemplation and the production of devotional texts. This way of [End Page 287] reading is well described by Jean Leclercq (Love of Learning and the Desire for God, 1961), who specifies pronouncing the words slowly, weighing "words in order to sound the depths of their full meaning," then "assimilating the contents of a text by means of a kind of mastication which releases its full flavor." I find neither this process nor St. Bonaventure's concept of the "repose of contemplation" particularly consistent with staged drama, which demands audible, usually rapid speech, but in the case of The Mary Play there may be an argument made, with the introduction of an onstage director named Contemplacio—and, along with the spoken dialogue, very considerable use of liturgical music (e.g., the Sarum hymn Jesu Corona Virginum for the Coronation of the Virgin sung by a choir of angels in heaven). The music may have been chanted slowly and meditatively as still is the practice at certain monasteries. Nevertheless, keeping in mind that East Anglia was a center of devotion to Mary as well as to her mother St. Anne, instead of proposing the play from this region as "contemplative," it seems to me it is more credibly identified simply as devotional. Such a looser categorization still would recognize the role of audience engagement, as of course participatory. To be sure, by the twentieth century such categories, along with "mysticism," had become muddled so far as definition is concerned. The next play under discussion, contained in its complete form only in the Macro manuscript, is deeply indebted for its form to Wisdom literature. The first sixty-five lines are essentially borrowed from of the mystic Heinrich Suso's Orologium Sapientiae and are introduced first by a stage description of "Everlastyng Wisdom...

The Transition from the Silent into the Sound Era in German Cinema

With the arrival of sound, cinema had to reinvent itself. The role of the scriptwriter became more complex. Directors had to conceptualise new narrative approaches in order to weave sonic elements into their storytelling. For the first time, sound enabled film to incorporate out-of vision sound to enhance narrative elements beyond the visual frame. Filmmakers such as Pabst, Lang, Dudow, and Lamprecht recognised the potential of sound film as extending further than the ability to use spoken dialogue in film, and attempted to incorporate sound in more creative ways through atmospheres and effects. One particularly striking example of the use of sound to conjure up the nightmare of human misery in the trenches is G.W. Pabst’s 1930 film Westfront 1918. Focusing on Pabst’s film as an example of sound as a storytelling device, this article discusses the function and emotive use of sound in several key scenes. The article also explores how the German film industry approached its transition from the silent into the sound era during the late 1920s, precisely at a time when the democratic foundations of the Weimar Republic became strained by increasingly polarised political pressures.

Student Evaluations of a (Rude) Spoken Dialogue System Insights from an Experimental Study

Communicating with spoken dialogue systems (SDS) such as Apple’s Siri® and Google’s Now is becoming more and more common. We report a study that manipulates an SDS’s word use with regard to politeness. In an experiment, 58 young adults evaluated the spoken messages of our self-developed SDS as it replied to typical questions posed by university freshmen. The answers were either formulated politely or rudely. Dependent measures were both holistic measures of how students perceived the SDS as well as detailed evaluations of each single answer. Results show that participants not only evaluated the content of rude answers as being less appropriate and less pleasant than the polite answers, but also evaluated the rude system as less accurate. Lack of politeness also impacted aspects of the perceived trustworthiness of the SDS. We conclude that users of SDS expect such systems to be polite, and we then discuss some practical implications for designing SDS.

Speech Technologies and the Assessment of Second Language Speaking: Approaches, Challenges, and Opportunities

ABSTRACTThis article provides an overview and evaluation of the uses—actual and potential—of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and spoken dialogue systems (SDS), related technologies that can be applied to second language speaking assessment, given particular definitions of the construct. Both technologies have only gradually moved in the direction of supporting language learning, and only more recently used for grading purposes. How the speaking construct is defined determines one’s evaluation of the extent to which assessments using these technologies are adequate to the task, given different test use contexts, and what the challenges and future research requirements are. In any event there are many opportunities for their use in assessment, and these would be facilitated by increased cross-disciplinary research among the language testing and speech technology communities.

PRINTEPS: An Integrated Intelligent Application Development Platform based on Stream Reasoning and ROS

Although AI and service robot applications have become very popular in many domains recently, many of them are specific applications and it is still difficult to develop integrated intelligent applications such as a robot teahouse and teaching assistant robots. To develop such integrated intelligent applications, we need integrated intelligent application platforms that have AI integration and agile process facilities. From the above background, we are currently developing PRactical INTElligent aPplicationS (PRINTEPS), which is a platform for developing integrated intelligent applications by combining only five types of modules, namely knowledge-based reasoning, spoken dialogue, image sensing, motion management, and machine learning. This paper proposes a workflow editor in PRINETPS based on a service-oriented architecture and a Robot Operating System that enables real-time parallel processing for multiple robots and sensors by integrating the five types of modules. The editor also supports not only developers but also domain experts in updating workflows frequently. This paper also proposes a novel method to integrate signals acquired through image sensing with knowledge (ontologies and business rules) using C-SPARQL and Semantic Web Rule Language. To evaluate PRINTEPS, we developed a robot teahouse application including customer reception and guidance to table services using a humanoid robot with PRINTEPS. Through this case study, we demonstrated that the behaviors of the robot can be modified by changing the workflow, the ontology, and the rules.

Smart Enough to Talk With Us? Foundations and Challenges for Dialogue Capable AI Systems

Smart Enough to Talk With Us? Foundations and Challenges for Dialogue Capable AI Systems

Oscillatory Brain Responses Reflect Anticipation during Comprehension of Speech Acts in Spoken Dialog

Everyday conversation requires listeners to quickly recognize verbal actions, so-called speech acts, from the underspecified linguistic code and prepare a relevant response within the tight time constraints of turn-taking. The goal of this study was to determine the time-course of speech act recognition by investigating oscillatory EEG activity during comprehension of spoken dialog. Participants listened to short, spoken dialogs with target utterances that delivered three distinct speech acts (Answers, Declinations, Pre-offers). The targets were identical across conditions at lexico-syntactic and phonetic/prosodic levels but differed in the pragmatic interpretation of the speech act performed. Speech act comprehension was associated with reduced power in the alpha/beta bands just prior to Declination speech acts, relative to Answers and Pre-offers. In addition, we observed reduced power in the theta band during the beginning of Declinations, relative to Answers. Based on the role of alpha and beta desynchronization in anticipatory processes, the results are taken to indicate that anticipation plays a role in speech act recognition. Anticipation of speech acts could be critical for efficient turn-taking, allowing interactants to quickly recognize speech acts and respond within the tight time frame characteristic of conversation. The results show that anticipatory processes can be triggered by the characteristics of the interaction, including the speech act type.

О методе выявления ценностной информации разговорного диалога

The problem of processing the spoken dialogue material aimed at the identification of the value content of informal verbal communication is considered. The relevance of the research is linked with the growing interest of communicative linguistics and cultural linguistics to the content and ways of expressing the value component of modern Russian speech practice. The author’s development of the procedure of axiological analysis of conversational dialogue is presented, for each stage of which (on the basis of approbation in the field of family and friendly speech communication) a certain theoretically grounded methodological solution is proposed. The auxiliary stage of the analysis is the structuring of the conversation dialogue. The importance of the following groups of elements is substantiated: 1) replica - dialogical unity -speech party; 2) value thematic fragment - value communicative fragment. The author argues that unique fragmentation of a dialogue on the value basis provides the researcher with a set of compact structural units of analysis suitable for identifying the value meanings of the included replicas of communicants. At the main stage of the analysis it is offered to carry out qualification of the value contents of replicas. The final statement about the quality of a speech act of a person is recommended to do on the basis of its comparison with the standards: maxims of speech communication and Russian speech ideal. The practical value of the work lies in the fact that on the basis of the proposed procedure an algorithm to identify valuable information of conversation can be built.

What Does že jo (and že ne) Mean in Spoken Dialogue

Abstract The goal of this paper is to examine the role of two collocations (že jo and že ne) in spoken dialogue. Both are said to be typical of spontaneous conversation and express a large scale of pragmatic functions, e.g. uncertainty of the speaker or a request for a backchannel. The examination of their positioning within the utterance in relation to the meaning of their close context helped us to identify the functions and to distinguish between cases which are simple co-occurrences of the conjunction že and the particle jo/ne, and those which are instances of the set phrase. The source material comes from the ORAL2013 and DIALOG corpora.

A Study on the Educational Applications of Multimedia Corpus for Japanese Language Learners at Beginner and Intermediate Levels: Focusing on Japanese subtitles in MMC motion pictures

I developed an MMC (Multimedia Corpus) of talk shows, drawing upon Japanese TV programs. The MMC can be useful for learning Japanese, as it provides users with an opportunity to observe the use of Japanese language and its communication behaviors practiced in everyday life. However, since the MMC has been established for research purpose in general, lower-level Japanese learners face difficulties in using it. Therefore, this paper aimed to increase the application capacity of the MMC by presenting motion pictures with subtitles that are created by adding yomigana tags to transcripts of spoken dialogues from the MMC. Further, using the MMC talk shows, I conducted a classroom activity with Japanese learners of kamoshirenai, which is a Japanese grammatical expression. Due to the yomigana tags, I did not have to explain to the students how to read Chinese characters and numeric numbers one by one; therefore, I was less stressed than before in preparing a class and undertaking classroom teaching. In addition, the overall satisfaction level among learners was high. I believe that my personal experiences can be extended to other teachers. However, the responses regarding students’ experiences of the subtitled motion pictures of the MMC for their learning, collected from the learners in my class activities, should be interpreted with care, as they are merely based on an opinion survey. A further investigation should be undertaken on which learning effects can be achieved using subtitled motion pictures of the MMC.

Ways of (Virtual) Seeing: Applying a Bergerian Lens in a Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE)

Ways of (Virtual) Seeing: Applying a Bergerian Lens in a Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE)

Larra, autor de la primera ópera española del siglo XIX: <em>El rapto</em> (1832). Estudio preliminar y edición crítica del nuevo manuscrito inédito

De importancia capital es esta publicación del manuscrito inédito de El Rapto (1832), la primera ópera escrita en español en la historia de nuestro teatro lírico debida a Mariano José de Larra, con música del maestro Genovés. Por primera vez se publica ahora el texto completo de la ópera, ya que en una edición anterior, de 1991, solo se pudieron dar a conocer los cantables, y no la totalidad de ellos, puesto que la parte declamada no aparecía en el único manuscrito hasta entonces conocido, de la Biblioteca Histórica Municipal de Madrid. Esta edición aporta además el aparato crítico necesario para la fijación del texto correcto, teniendo en cuenta las enmiendas y correcciones que aparecen de puño y letra de Larra que figuran en el nuevo manuscrito y contrastando las variantes que presentan los cantables respecto a la edición anterior. El estudio preliminar añade el análisis y la valoración de esta obra tan significativa dentro del contexto histórico y dramático en el que se produjo.

Spoken dialog summarization system with HAPPINESS/SUFFERING factor recognition

This work presents a spoken dialog summarization system with HAPPINESS/SUFFERING factor recognition. The semantic content is compressed and classified by factor categories from spoken dialog. The transcription of automatic speech recognition is then processed through Chinese Knowledge and Information Processing segmentation system. The proposed system also adopts the part-of-speech tags to effectively select and rank the keywords. Finally, the HAPPINESS/SUFFERING factor recognition is done by the proposed point-wise mutual information. Compared with the original method, the performance is improved by applying the significant scores of keywords. The experimental results show that the average precision rate for factor recognition in outside test can reach 73.5% which demonstrates the possibility and potential of the proposed system.

Miscommunication handling in spoken dialog systems based on error-aware dialog state detection

With the exponential growth in computing power and progress in speech recognition technology, spoken dialog systems (SDSs) with which a user interacts through natural speech has been widely used in human-computer interaction. However, error-prone automatic speech recognition (ASR) results usually lead to inappropriate semantic interpretation so that miscommunication happens easily. This paper presents an approach to error-aware dialog state (DS) detection for robust miscommunication handling in an SDS. Non-understanding (Non-U) and misunderstanding (Mis-U) are considered for miscommunication handling in this study. First, understanding evidence (UE), derived from the recognition confidence, is adopted for Non-U detection followed by Non-U recovery. For Mis-U with the recognized sentence containing uncertain recognized words, the partial sentences obtained by removing potentially misrecognized words from the input utterance are organized, based on regular expressions, as a tree structure to tolerate the deletion or rejection of keywords resulting from misrecognition for Mis-U DS modeling. Latent semantic analysis is then employed to consider the verified words and their n-grams for DS detection, including Mis-U and predefined Base DSs. Historical information-based n-grams are employed to find the most likely DS for the SDS. Several experiments were performed with a dialog corpus for the restaurant reservation task. The experimental results show that the proposed approach achieved a promising performance for Non-U recovery and Mis-U repair as well as a satisfactory task success rate for the dialogs using the proposed method.

The Effects of Captions on EFL Learners’ Comprehension of English-Language Television Programs

The Multimedia Principle (Fletcher & Tobias, 2005) states that people learn better and comprehend more when words and pictures are presented together. The potential for English language learners to increase their comprehension of video through the use of captions, which graphically display the same language as the spoken dialogue, has been documented in previous research. However, studies have generally used short videos (Markham & Peter, 2003; Montero Perez, Peters & Desmet, 2014) or videos designed for language learning (Chung, 1999) rather than episodes of L2 television programs that students are most likely to watch on their own outside of the classroom. The present study aimed to fill this gap by investigating the comprehension of 372 Japanese university students who watched ten 42-minute episodes of an American television program with and without captions. While viewing the episodes, the participants completed comprehension tests. Analysis indicated that although the participants who viewed the episodes with captions had comprehension scores that were slightly higher across all episodes, their scores were only significantly different for three of the ten episodes. The results revealed that captions are likely to aid comprehension when episodes are most difficult. Explanations for the findings and pedagogical applications are offered.

Cluster-based approach to discriminate the user’s state whether a user is embarrassed or thinking to an answer to a prompt

Spoken dialog systems are employed in various devices to help users operate them. An advantage of a spoken dialog system is that the user can make input utterances freely, but the system sometimes makes it difficult for the user to speak to it. The system should estimate the state of a user who encounters a problem when starting a dialog and then give appropriate help before the user abandons the dialog. Based on this assumption, our research aims to construct a system which responds to a user who does not reply to the system. In this paper, we propose a method of discriminating the user’s state based on vector quantization of non-verbal information such as prosodic features, facial feature points, and gaze. The experimental results showed that the proposed method outperforms the conventional approaches and achieves a discrimination ratio of 72.0%. Then, we examined sequential discrimination for responding to the user at an appropriate timing. The results indicate that the discrimination ratio reached equal to the end of the session at around 6.0 s.

Conversational Entrainment of Vocal Fry in Young Adult Female American English Speakers

Conversational entrainment, the natural tendency for people to modify their behaviors to more closely match their communication partner, is examined as one possible mechanism modulating the prevalence of vocal fry in the speech of young American women engaged in spoken dialogue. Twenty young adult female American English speakers engaged in two spoken dialogue tasks-one with a young adult female American English conversational partner who exhibited substantial vocal fry and one with a young adult female American English conversational partner who exhibited quantifiably less vocal fry. Dialogues were analyzed for proportion of vocal fry, by speaker, and two measures of communicative success (efficiency and enjoyment). Participants employed significantly more vocal fry when conversing with the partner who exhibited substantial vocal fry than when conversing with the partner who exhibited quantifiably less vocal fry. Further, greater similarity between communication partners in their use of vocal fry tracked with higher scores of communicative efficiency and communicative enjoyment. Conversational entrainment offers a mechanistic framework that may be used to explain, to some degree, the frequency with which vocal fry is employed by young American women engaged in spoken dialogue. Further, young American women who modulated their vocal patterns during dialogue to match those of their conversational partner gained more efficiency and enjoyment from their interactions, demonstrating the cognitive and social benefits of entrainment.

Spoken dialogue and persons with disabilities

Spoken dialogue and persons with disabilities