Download or read book Pragmatics in Practice written by Jan-Ola Östman and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2011-12-15 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thereby attempting to divide up its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, social, cultural, discursive, variational, or interactional angles, this 9th volume focuses on what pragmatics is good for – beyond the very discipline of pragmatics as such. The chapters in the volume thus address the importance of taking a pragmatic perspective on traditional fields of applied linguistics (contrastive and error analysis, translation), and they address the core of pragmatics as the study of language use (with phenomena ranging from irony and emphasis to literacy and mass media, and with approaches to the function of language like rhetoric, stylistics, corpus analysis, and general semantics). The volume contains chapters not only on the spoken and written modes of communication, but also on signed language pragmatics and on computer-mediated communication. The impact and usefulness of taking a pragmatic perspective on language for a deeper understanding of clinical and rehabilitation practices has recently received ever more focus; in this volume, aspects of this direction of research are dealt with in the chapter on clinical pragmatics. In most of the chapters in the volume, ethics has a core role to play, not only in issues of authenticity in general in relation to research on language use, but also in issues that have a direct influence on the (linguistic) culture and society we live in, irrespective of whether we are part of a (linguistic) majority or a minority, or a minority within a minority: language policy and language planning, language ecology, and language in relation to legal matters. In all of these fields, we see the importance of research within pragmatics as a discipline dealing with how language influences our everyday lives. All in all, the volume presents different perspectives on how research in pragmatics not only can be put to practice, but how pragmatics is used as a tool to gain a better understanding of the world we live in.

Download or read book Speech and Computer written by Andrey Ronzhin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-09-03 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Speech and Computer, SPECOM 2015, held in Athens, Greece, in September 2015. The 59 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 104 initial submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics in the area of computer speech processing such as recognition, synthesis, and understanding and related domains including signal processing, language and text processing, multi-modal speech processing or human-computer interaction.

Download or read book Text Speech and Dialogue written by Václav Matoušek and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-08-21 with total page 1357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Text, Speech and Dialogue, TSD 2007, held in Pilsen, Czech Republic, September 3-7, 2007. The 80 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 198 submissions. The papers present a wealth of state-of-the-art research results in the field of natural language processing with an emphasis on text, speech, and spoken dialogue ranging from theoretical and methodological issues to applications in various fields and with special focus on corpora, texts and tra.

Download or read book Spoken Dialogue Technology written by Michael F. McTear and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-06-27 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spoken Dialogue Technology provides extensive coverage of spoken dialogue systems, ranging from the theoretical underpinnings of the study of dialogue through to a detailed look at a number of well-established methods and tools for developing spoken dialogue systems. The book enables students and practitioners to design and test dialogue systems using several available development environments and languages, including the CSLU toolkit, VoiceXML, SALT, and XHTML+ voice. This practical orientation is usually available otherwise only in reference manuals supplied with software development kits. The latest research in spoken dialogue systems is presented along with extensive coverage of the most relevant theoretical issues and a critical evaluation of current research prototypes. A dedicated web site containing supplementary materials, code, links to resources will enable readers to develop and test their own systems (). Previously such materials have been difficult to track down, available only on a range of disparate web sites and this web site provides a unique and useful reference source which will prove invaluable.

Download or read book Constructive Dialogue Modelling written by Kristiina Jokinen and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-05-27 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dialogue management technology has developed rapidly over the years resulting in real-time applications like telephony directories, timetable enquiries, and in-car applications. However, the current technology is still largely based on models that use rigid command language type interactions, and the users need to adapt their human communication strategies to the needs of the technology. As an increasing number of interactive ubiquitous applications will appear, challenges for interaction technology concern especially natural, more human-friendly communication. Recent research has focused on developing speech-based interactive systems that aim to increase the system’s communicative competence. By including aspects of interaction beyond simple speech recognition and question-answer based interaction, applications with more conversational interfaces have become possible. New dialogue management technology needs to address the challenges in human-technology interaction, so that smart environments should not only enable user-controlled command interfaces but equip applications with a capability that affords easy and friendly interactions with the user. Dialogue Modelling: Speech Interaction and Rational Agents provides an overview of the current dialogue technology and research trends in spoken dialogue systems, presenting a coherent perspective of AI-based cooperative interaction management. The book complements existing research regarding human-computer interfaces, speech and language technology, and communication studies in general, bringing different view-points together and integrating them into a single point of reference. Constructive Dialogue Modelling: Presents a guide to spoken dialogue technology and current research trends. Provides an overview of human factors in dialogue systems and delivers a new metaphor for human-computer interaction and computer as agent. Explains the architecture of dialogue systems using examples from systems such as Interact and DUMAS Offers a comprehensive overview of original research into the new trends in speech dialogue technology in light of innovations such as ubiquitous computing. This book will provide essential reading for industrial designers and interface engineers, university researchers and teachers, computer scientists, human communication researchers, speech and language technologists, cognitive engineers/cognitive scientists, as well as social and media researchers, and psychologists. Advanced students and researchers in computer science, speech and language technologies, psychology and communication research will find this text of interest.

Download or read book Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing written by Alexander Gelbukh and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-02-03 with total page 605 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, held in February 2006. The 43 revised full papers and 16 revised short papers presented together with three invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 176 submissions. The papers are structured into two parts and organized in topical sections on computational linguistics research.

Download or read book Handbook of Pragmatics written by Jef Verschueren and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2003 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook of Pragmatics provides easy access -- for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language -- to the different topics, traditions and methods which together make up the field of Pragmatics, broadly conceived as the cognitive, social and cultural study of language and communication, i.e. the science of language use. The Handbook of Pragmatics is a unique reference work for researchers, which has been expanded and updated continuously with annual installments since 1995. It is also available online.

Download or read book The Balancing Act written by Judith L. Klavans and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Symbolic and statistical approaches to language have historically been at odds--the former viewed as difficult to test and therefore perhaps impossible to define, and the latter as descriptive but possibly inadequate. At the heart of the debate are fundamental questions concerning the nature of language, the role of data in building a model or theory, and the impact of the competence-performance distinction on the field of computational linguistics. Currently, there is an increasing realization in both camps that the two approaches have something to offer in achieving common goals. The eight contributions in this book explore the inevitable "balancing act" that must take place when symbolic and statistical approaches are brought together--including basic choices about what knowledge will be represented symbolically and how it will be obtained, what assumptions underlie the statistical model, what principles motivate the symbolic model, and what the researcher gains by combining approaches. The topics covered include an examination of the relationship between traditional linguistics and statistical methods, qualitative and quantitative methods of speech translation, study and implementation of combined techniques for automatic extraction of terminology, comparative analysis of the contributions of linguistic cues to a statistical word grouping system, automatic construction of a symbolic parser via statistical techniques, combining linguistic with statistical methods in automatic speech understanding, exploring the nature of transformation-based learning, and a hybrid symbolic/statistical approach to recovering from parser failures.

Download or read book Dialogue Processing in Spoken Language Systems written by Elisabeth Meier and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1997-06-11 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the strictly refereed post-workshop documentation of the ECAI'96 Workshop on Dialogue Processing in Spoken Language Systems, held in Budapest, Hungary, in August 1996, during ECAI'96. The volume presents 16 revised full papers including a detailed introduction and survey paper by the volume editors. The papers are organized in sections on foundations of spoken language dialogue systems, dialogue systems and prosodic aspects of spoken dialogue processing, spoken dialogue systems-design and implementation, and evaluation of systems. The book reports on work being pursued both in academia and in industry as a crucial issue in speech processing.

Download or read book Historical Perspectives on Forms of English Dialogue written by Gabriella Mazzon and published by FrancoAngeli. This book was released on 2012 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Mathematical Foundations of Speech and Language Processing written by Mark Johnson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speech and language technologies continue to grow in importance as they are used to create natural and efficient interfaces between people and machines, and to automatically transcribe, extract, analyze, and route information from high-volume streams of spoken and written information. The workshops on Mathematical Foundations of Speech Processing and Natural Language Modeling were held in the Fall of 2000 at the University of Minnesota's NSF-sponsored Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications, as part of a "Mathematics in Multimedia" year-long program. Each workshop brought together researchers in the respective technologies on the one hand, and mathematicians and statisticians on the other hand, for an intensive week of cross-fertilization. There is a long history of benefit from introducing mathematical techniques and ideas to speech and language technologies. Examples include the source-channel paradigm, hidden Markov models, decision trees, exponential models and formal languages theory. It is likely that new mathematical techniques, or novel applications of existing techniques, will once again prove pivotal for moving the field forward. This volume consists of original contributions presented by participants during the two workshops. Topics include language modeling, prosody, acoustic-phonetic modeling, and statistical methodology.

Download or read book Computing Meaning written by Harry Bunt and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-09-18 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of papers by leading researchers in computational semantics. It presents a state-of-the-art overview of recent and current research in computational semantics, including descriptions of new methods for constructing and improving resources for semantic computation, such as WordNet, VerbNet, and semantically annotated corpora. It also presents new statistical methods in semantic computation, such as the application of distributional semantics in the compositional calculation of sentence meanings. Computing the meaning of sentences, texts, and spoken or texted dialogue is the ultimate challenge in natural language processing, and the key to a wide range of exciting applications. The breadth and depth of coverage of this book makes it suitable as a reference and overview of the state of the field for researchers in Computational Linguistics, Semantics, Computer Science, Cognitive Science, and Artificial Intelligence. ​

Download or read book Towards Adaptive Spoken Dialog Systems written by Alexander Schmitt and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-09-19 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Monitoring Adaptive Spoken Dialog Systems, authors Alexander Schmitt and Wolfgang Minker investigate statistical approaches that allow for recognition of negative dialog patterns in Spoken Dialog Systems (SDS). The presented stochastic methods allow a flexible, portable and accurate use. Beginning with the foundations of machine learning and pattern recognition, this monograph examines how frequently users show negative emotions in spoken dialog systems and develop novel approaches to speech-based emotion recognition using hybrid approach to model emotions. The authors make use of statistical methods based on acoustic, linguistic and contextual features to examine the relationship between the interaction flow and the occurrence of emotions using non-acted recordings several thousand real users from commercial and non-commercial SDS. Additionally, the authors present novel statistical methods that spot problems within a dialog based on interaction patterns. The approaches enable future SDS to offer more natural and robust interactions. This work provides insights, lessons and inspiration for future research and development, not only for spoken dialog systems, but for data-driven approaches to human-machine interaction in general.

Download or read book Web Reasoning and Rule Systems written by Massimo Marchiori and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-06-27 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems, RR 2007, held in Innsbruck, Austria. It address all current topics in Web reasoning and rule systems, including acquisition of rules and ontologies by knowledge extraction, design and analysis of reasoning languages, reasoning with constraints, rule languages and systems, semantic Web services modeling and applications.

Download or read book Fundamentals of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and the Biometric Issue written by A. Esposito and published by IOS Press. This book was released on 2007-05-22 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The main theme of this publication is the fundamental features of verbal and nonverbal communication and their relationships with the identification of a person, his/her socio-cultural background and personal traits. The problem of understanding human behaviour in terms of personal traits, and the possibility of an algorithmic implementation that exploits personal traits to identify a person unambiguously, are among the great challenges of modern science and technology. On the one hand, there is the theoretical question of what makes each individual unique among all others that share similar traits, and what makes a culture unique among various cultures. On the other hand, there is the technological need to be able to protect people from individual disturbance and dangerous behaviour that could damage an entire community. As regards to the problem of understanding human behaviour, one of the most interesting research areas is that related to human interaction and face-to-face communication. It is in this context that knowledge is shared and personal traits acquire their significance.

Download or read book The Dialogues of Plato Volume 1 written by Plato and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1984-01-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This initial volume in a series of new translations of Plato's works includes a general introduction and interpretive comments for the dialogues translated: the Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Gorgias, and Menexenus. "Allen's work is very impressive. The translations are readable, lucid, and highly accurate. The general introduction is succinct and extremely clear. The discussion of the dating of the dialogues is enormously useful; there has previously been no brief account of these issues to which one could refer the student. Finally, the particular introductions are first rate: fine jobs of clear philosophical and historical explanation--succinct and yet sophisticated, both close to the text and philosophically incisive."--Martha Nussbaum, Brown University "This is an important work that deserves our respect and attention."--Ethics "This and the promised succeeding volumes will probably become the standard English version of the complete dialogues.... The commentaries take advantage of the best scholarship, judge judiciously between divergent views, and often introduce new and brilliant interpretations. This is true both in the area of philosophy and in that of literary criticism."--Anthony C. Daly, S.J., Modern Schoolman "Allen is a superb translator, whose elegantly simple yet precise language gives access to Plato both as a philosopher and as a literary artist."--Library Journal "An important event in the world of scholarship."--London Review of Books

Download or read book Speech Prosody in Speech Synthesis Modeling and generation of prosody for high quality and flexible speech synthesis written by Keikichi Hirose and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-02-25 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The volume addresses issues concerning prosody generation in speech synthesis, including prosody modeling, how we can convey para- and non-linguistic information in speech synthesis, and prosody control in speech synthesis (including prosody conversions). A high level of quality has already been achieved in speech synthesis by using selection-based methods with segments of human speech. Although the method enables synthetic speech with various voice qualities and speaking styles, it requires large speech corpora with targeted quality and style. Accordingly, speech conversion techniques are now of growing interest among researchers. HMM/GMM-based methods are widely used, but entail several major problems when viewed from the prosody perspective; prosodic features cover a wider time span than segmental features and their frame-by-frame processing is not always appropriate. The book offers a good overview of state-of-the-art studies on prosody in speech synthesis.