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This study is based on a stage-by-stage dialogue between four geography staff and seven students. Members of staff were asked to identify issues that reflect academically inappropriate behaviour in classes for students at university (as opposed to school) level. Students were then asked to comment on the staff's views. In general, the students felt that staff's comments showed a lack of understanding about what the students were going through in making the transition to tertiary education. Rejoinders from staff were notable for leading to new ideas, reinforcing positions or, in one case, feeling misinterpreted. The dialogue led to reflections on misunderstandings about student transitions to tertiary education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a theoretical examination of the relationship between truth (understood experientially) and forms of dialogue, in discursive psychology. To do this, I mainly draw on Bakhtin (1929/1984 , 1975/1981 ) and Kiekegaard (1841/1989 , 1846/1968 ). In contrast to a hermeneutic tradition that has sidelined the importance of the author to discourse (e.g., Barthes, 1967/1977 ), these authors offer an understanding of truth that depends on the author's emotional connection to the truth they are expressing. They most clearly demonstrate the dynamics of our emotional connection to truth in their descriptions of different forms of speech. Kierkegaard describes the relationship between self and truth in irony, while Bakhtin does the same in the epic, the confession and the quarrel. It is my argument that these forms of speech interact with truth and help organise selfhood. I also argue that our current methodological emphasis on the function of words or the play of dominant discourses tend to overlook the experiential landscape of language and its reciprocal relationship with our subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research critiques Wertsch's truck-puzzle experiments by first questioning if those results constituted linguistic artifacts, and questioning if the resulting referential continuum comprised a legitimate developmental form. The participants in the original truck-puzzle experiments interacted using American English and Portuguese. To determine if the results were linguistic artifacts, they were compared with those of functionally related Japanese data, which were found to verify the original findings. Additionally, from this comparison, a new referential form was discovered. Finally, the original referential continuum was found to consist of forms that constitute change rather than development. Wertsch's work is valuable in that it refines and supplements Vygotsky's notion of external speech. This current research partially verifies Wertsch's findings, uncovers an additional referential form, argues for new developmental continua, and appends the results to Vygofsky's original developmental continuum, generating a more sensitive tool with which to analyze microgenesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper, we study the impact of considering context information for the annotation of emotions. Concretely, we propose the inclusion of the history of user–system interaction and the neutral speaking style of users. A new method to automatically include both sources of information has been developed making use of novel techniques for acoustic normalization and dialogue context annotation. We have carried out experiments with a corpus extracted from real human interactions with a spoken dialogue system. Results show that the performance of non-expert human annotators and machine-learned classifications are both affected by contextual information. The proposed method allows the annotation of more non-neutral emotions and yields values closer to maximum agreement rates for non-expert human annotation. Moreover, automatic classification accuracy improves by 29.57% compared to the classical approach based only on acoustic features. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

A literary criticism of the play "Long Day's Journey into Night," by Eugene O'Neill is presented. It explores the use of allusion in the play and outlines the ways in which O'Neill constructs gendered space using dialogue. The author argues that the marked difference between male characters' prolific use of allusion and the lack of allusions in the character Mary's dialogue reinforces the gendered nature of language in the play.

In this paper I will draw upon ANT to consider how political associations are generated within a global network of grassroots peasant movements. ANT has failed to fully consider the ways of generating such associations, especially the processes through which such associations are made. In so doing, the causes of and accountability for differential power relations have been precluded, as have the productive dimensions of that power. Through a consideration of the moments and strategies of network translation, I will show that power inequalities and intentionality act to determine the contours of network association. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relevance of inner speech for psychological life has been recognized in the literature, and several scales and questionnaires have provided evidence. However, evidence coming from direct observation of the phenomena is still rare. The aim of this study was to specify modes of verbalized inner speech as expression of self-consciousness (reflexivity or internal conversation). Eighteen adults (between 19 and 34 years old) were instructed to express aloud their thinking during a task with the Brazilian version of the Raven Progressive Matrices Test. Participants' thinking-aloud verbalizations were submitted to a qualitative analysis based on three reflexive steps of semiotic-phenomenology: description, reduction, and interpretation. Description revealed a structure of verbalized inner speech organized on the basis of three main typifications: visual description, logical reasoning, and dialogue. Reduction recognized dialogical relations as an essential feature underlying verbalized inner speech, characterized by two different aspects of information and communication. Interpretation indicated that an accurate account of the conscious expression of dialogical relations requires understanding the communicative process as a logical relationship with an emphasis on its pragmatic function. The conscious experience of reflexivity is disclosed as both temporal (a marked presence) and spatial (marked as an absence). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on primary and secondary data, this paper explores the dynamics of the politics involved in the social dialogue process in Zimbabwe; more specifically the utility of the process as a tool to resolve socio-economic problems. The paper further seeks to demonstrate the relationship between failure to reform on the political policy front and economic problems thereby explaining why social dialogue in Zimbabwe fails to yield the intended results. It is the contention of this paper that as long as governance issues are not addressed by the ruling party, the Tripartite Negotiating Forum (TNF) will forever remain a "talk shop" and the Zimbabwean economy will not improve. In light of the "politicking" that characterises the social dialogue process in Zimbabwe, the paper came up with possible recommendations for the strengthening and improving of institutions of social dialogue based on the lessons learned from Zimbabwe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares one-dimensional and multi-dimensional dialogue act tagsets used for automatic labeling of utterances. The influence of tagset dimensionality on tagging accuracy is first discussed theoretically, then based on empirical data from human and automatic annotations of large scale resources, using four existing tagsets: damsl, swbd-damsl, icsi-mrda and maltus. The Dominant Function Approximation proposes that automatic dialogue act taggers could focus initially on finding the main dialogue function of each utterance, which is empirically acceptable and has significant practical relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports studies on annotating and automatically detecting dialog acts in human–human spoken dialogs. The work reposes on three hypotheses: first, the succession of dialog acts is strongly constrained; second, the initial word and semantic class of word are more important for identifying dialog acts than the complete exact word sequence of an utterance; third, most of the important information is encoded in specific entities. A memory based learning approach is used to detect dialog acts. For each utterance unit, eight dialog acts are systematically annotated. Experiments have been conducted using different levels of information, with and without the use of dialog history information. In order to assess the generality of the method, the specific entity tag based model trained on a French corpus was tested on an English corpus for a similar task and on a French corpus from a different domain. A correct dialog act detection rate of about 86% is obtained for the same domain/language condition and 77% for the cross-language or cross-domain conditions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We investigated how a listener's perceived meaning of a spoken sentence is influenced by the relative timing between a speaker's speech and accompanying hand gestures. Participants viewed a computer-animated character who uttered the phrase, "Put the book there now." while executing a simple right-handed beat gesture whose location relative to the utterance was precisely controlled in a frame-by-frame fashion. The participant's task consisted of making a judgment about two related aspects of the actor's perceived speech: (a) Which word was emphasized? and (b) How clear was the emphasis? That is, did it make sense? The results revealed that the perceived emphasis was determined by the timing (phasing) of the speaker's hand gesture. Furthermore, the clarity of the perceived emphasis (i.e., meaningfulness) was influenced by the affordances in the immediate environment of the speaker. Discussion addresses the primacy of ostensive specification and gesture in communicative events, the dynamics of speech-hand coordination during both actual and virtual dialogue, and the role of environmental affordances in grounding informative communicative acts in the ecology of organism-environment dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the steps toward effective implementation of multiculturalism. We are encouraged to move beyond the extremes of definitions of multiculturalism to reflect upon our more personal perceptions in the form of open dialogue (Gollnick & Chinn, 2006; Nieto, Young, Tran, & Pang, 1994; Trubowitz, 1995). Techniques for building a consensus are outlined. Finally, strategies effective in moving toward successful implementation are highlighted. Infused into the discussion are case examples that personalize the valuable benefits of multiculturalism; challenging educators to end the debate on the value of multiculturalism, and to begin focusing on the development of effective practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins with a review of second language acquisition research leading up to the 1997 article by Firth and Wagner. We argue that the Firth and Wagner article did not represent a new direction, but rather continued a type of argumentation that was already prevalent in the field at the time of the 1997 publication. We identify 3 issues as key in Firth and Wagner's argument: the scope of the research question, the multiple identities of research participants, and the context considered in research. A survey of 4 journals in the field and their treatment of these 3 issues, beginning before Firth and Wagner (1997) and leading up to the present, suggests that the article did not result in significant changes to the field and its target questions. The significance of Firth and Wagner's article lies in its licensing of situated research, and that broadening of the research base is undoubtedly positive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we begin by delineating the background to and motivations behind Firth and Wagner (1997) , wherein we called for a reconceptualization of second language acquisition (SLA) research. We then outline and comment upon some of our critics' reactions to the article. Next we review and discuss the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological impact the article has had on the SLA field. Thereafter, we reengage and develop some of the themes raised but left undeveloped in the 1997 article. These themes cluster around the notions of and interrelationships between language use, language learning, and language acquisition. Although we devote space to forwarding the position that the dichotomy of language use and acquisition cannot defensibly be maintained (and in this we take up a contrary position to that held in mainstream SLA), our treatment of the issues is essentially methodological. We focus on describing a variety of aspects of learning-in-action, captured in transcripts of recordings of naturally occurring foreign, second, or other language interactions. Through transcript analyses, we explore the possibilities of describing learning-in-action devoid of cognitivistic notions of language and learning. In so doing, we advance moves to formulate and establish a reconceptualized SLA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the development of spoken discourse among L2 learners of Japanese who received extensive practice on grammatical chunks. Participants in this study were 22 college students enrolled in an elementary Japanese course. They received instruction on a set of grammatical chunks in class through communicative drills and the memorization of dialogues that contained the target chunks. The development of the students' spoken discourse was examined through spontaneous conversations and narrative tasks administered twice during the semester at five-week intervals. Results showed that the students produced twice as many grammatical chunks in the second data collection session, with a wider range of chunk types. The frequency and range of the chunks in the narrative task were about half of those recorded in the conversation task. The participants also showed increasing sensitivity to discourse features over time, suggesting that memorized chunks served as a basis for the creative construction of discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this contribution is to take a number of key notions in dialogical theory, and look for their possible counterparts in recent neuroscience. This comprises points like other-orientation, relationism and context-interdependence, embodiment of language, responsive understanding, potentialities, unfinalisability, implicitness and degrees of awareness, and redundancy of processing. The conclusion is that there is indeed an incipient convergence between neuro-biology and cognitive dynamics, on the one hand, and dialogism on the other. A general dialogical framework has something to offer to cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, not in the least because dialogue and dialogical interaction appear to be more fundamental than language (at least as language has been conceived most often). Brains are complex organisms coordinating the apperception of and interventions into the world, rather than producing and processing agency-free representations of the world. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article explores the contextual, methodological and theoretical implications of using psychoanalytic concepts within sociological analysis. Through the interpretation of an interaction between myself and a research participant as an instance of 'resistance', I argue that it is possible to recontextualize psychoanalytic concepts, but that this recontextualization involves an inevitable transformation in meaning. In addition, I suggest that an analysis incorporating psychoanalytically derived interpretations, combined with more traditional approaches to discursive social analysis, can enhance our understanding of social phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses communication in education and how it is affected by the myriad differences that make up "diversity" in U.S. schools of the 21st century. The authors present the Skilled Dialogue approach, describing it as a practical framework to help teachers access the richness of diverse perspectives, build connections, and preserve identity. They focus on strategies that promote respectful, reciprocal, and responsive interactions between and among educators, students, and families.

Understanding English as a Second Language (ESL) learners' problems and strategy use for oral communication tasks is important in order to help learners in oral language development. Nonetheless, these problems and strategies are normally inaccessible to the teachers, as learners' thought processes are hidden in the `black box' of their minds. This renders it difficult to help learners develop second language (L2) oral skills. This paper reports on findings from a study that attempted to employ stimulated recall (SR) as a research method to tap the learners' thoughts in action when they were trying to cope with L2 group discussions. An analysis of the mental processes of two students was conducted. It was found that the students reported using different strategies to resolve the problems of `what to say' and `how to say it' during online speech processing. In addition, the more articulate learner could identify metacognitive strategies for planning ideas and monitoring group interaction. This paper argues that SR may be an appropriate and effective means to investigate learners' problems and strategies for L2 oral tasks. SR may also be usefully incorporated into the teaching of oral skills, whereby the teacher can explore learner strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My aim in this article is to show the usefulness of pragmatics for translation analysis and, tentatively, translation training. The tools and methods developed by pragmatics in the past four decades are particularly useful for the analysis of dialogue and, more generally, face-to-face interaction. Therefore, a source text is chosen which displays a rich and intricate web of personal and social relations, and whose dialogues strike a delicate balance between what is spoken and unspoken, said and implied. Jane Austen's Emma is compared with three Italian target texts in order to verify if that web and that balance are kept, erased, or altered in translation: the results are, perhaps not surprisingly, mixed, and demonstrate that a knowledge of the pragmatics of face-to-face interaction can be of great advantage to the translator of Emma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The view that the self has multiple parts and that these appear in people seeking psychotherapy—and people conducting psychotherapy—is shared by clinicians of various orientations and supported by psychological research. It is useful for clinicians to think of patients as multifaceted and pay attention to the changes between facets that occur during therapy. They can thus help hidden parts to surface, facilitate dialogue between parts not in contact with each other, and convince excessively dominant or oppressive parts to make room for other adaptive facets. The authors contributing to this issue of Journal of Clinical Psychology: In Session describe, from their different theoretical perspectives, how they deal with patients' and therapists' inner multiplicity in clinical practice. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol: In Session 63: 119–127, 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schizophrenia often involves a profound experience of one's identity as diminished, which complicates adaptation to the demands of daily life. Within a backdrop of dialogical self-theory, we provide a report of an individual psychotherapy over the course of 4 years that assisted a patient suffering from schizophrenia to move from a state in which few aspects of self were available for internal or external conversation to one in which there was greater accessibility of multiple aspects of self, leading to richer dialogues, improved function, and a better quality of life. It is suggested a primary intervention of the therapist was continuously to offer the client a view of himself that invited him to experience himself in a plausible manner shared with and listened to by another. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol: In Session 63: 129–139, 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotion-focused therapy regards the client's problems as indications that the inner dialogue among voices of the self has become fractious, often because one or more voices have developed emotion schemes that are based on maladaptive emotions. The goal of therapy is to transform such maladaptive emotions into more adaptive ones. The therapist's interventions focus on facilitating the client's process of dialogue among the voices of the self and guiding the client toward experiencing of adaptive emotions. These new experiences contribute to a dynamic shift in the relation among the voices. A case study illustrates how a male client's rage and hopelessness transformed into assertiveness and tenderness as the various voices learned to respect and help each other within the self. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol: In Session 63: 175–186, 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Douglas Walton's taxonomy of dialogue types facilitates a normative analysis of different types of dialogue practiced in Philosophy for Children. The overarching goal of a dialogue in Philosophy for Children is for the participants to arrive at reasonable philosophical judgments. This goal determines the types and uses of dialogue appropriate to P4C, including five of Walton's types—negotiation, information-seeking, persuasion, inquiry and deliberation. P4C practice would be enhanced if participants and facilitators gave attention to the norms of the various types of dialogue they engaged in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on the nature of ‘dialogic teaching’ to help answer the question: ‘What kinds of dialogue do children need?‘ It draws on Bakhtin's analysis of different genres of dialogue and research into philosophy with children to describe how Socratic and Menippean dialogue can extend the creative possibilities of enquiry with children. It argues that Menippean dialogue can add value to Socratic and other more directive kinds of dialogue, illustrating this with examples of dialogue drawn from philosophical enquiries with children using a ‘Stories for Thinking’ approach. It identifies the key features of a community of enquiry and concludes with a summary of ways Socratic and Menippean dialogue can stimulate, engage and inspire ‘dancing minds’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Borrowing from the negotiation literature, we tested 2 factors that might improve stakeholder dialogue in program and policy evaluation. Undergraduate stakeholders (61 pairs) engaged in dialogue about their universities' alcohol policies. Pairs were randomly assigned to levels of accountability audience and dialogue structure. The audience for the videotaped dialogue was described as holding either (a) views about the policy similar to the participant's, consistent across audience members (homogeneous), or (b) mixed views, on both sides of the issue (heterogeneous). Pairs approached the dialogue with either (a) problem-solving goals or (b) no particular strategy. Dyads accountable to a heterogeneous audience and given problem-solving instructions exhibited the most effective dialogue. Accountability to a heterogeneous audience facilitated satisfaction with and optimism about dialogue. Accountability to homogeneous audiences and adopting no particular strategy yielded the least positive perceptions of dialogue. Implications for stakeholder dialogue, and for the role of social psychology in evaluation are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the impact of dialogue and deep-level-reasoning questions on vicarious learning in 2 studies with undergraduates. In Experiment 1, participants learned material by interacting with AutoTutor or by viewing 1 of 4 vicarious learning conditions: a noninteractive recorded version of the AutoTutor dialogues, a dialogue with a deep-level-reasoning question preceding each sentence, a dialogue with a deep-level-reasoning question preceding half of the sentences, or a monologue. Learners in the condition where a deep-level-reasoning question preceded each sentence significantly outperformed those in the other 4 conditions. Experiment 2 included the same interactive and noninteractive recorded condition, along with 2 vicarious learning conditions involving deep-level-reasoning questions. Both deep-level-reasoning-question conditions significantly outperformed the other conditions. These findings provide evidence that deep-level-reasoning questions improve vicarious learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we examine parenthetical uses of honesty phrases (HPs) such as to be honest and honest to God in mundane domestic telephone calls and, for comparison, police interrogations. Parenthetical uses of HPs express a speaker's stance on the complement to which they are attached. We focus on HPs in two kinds of turn sequences: in framing dispreferred answers in question–answer (Q–A) sequences and in framing assessments. In Q–A sequences, HP+complement structures offer accounts for inability to answer in the form of reports on the speaker's intentional state (what they think, know, prefer, etc.). In assessment sequences, they frame first assessments as personal to the speaker and make relevant subsequent claims for independent, "my-side" assessments by second assessors. Generally, HPs are optional members' methods (among others) of asserting sincerity and independence as the basis of what they are saying on occasions when something functional, normative, or otherwise motivated is expectable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dialogue is an encounter between two or more human beings. We will consider how some scientists, philosophers and religious scholars have looked at dialogue and attempt to learn from each tradition while seeing this encounter under the umbrella of ‘Systems theory’, related to thermodynamics and flavored with Buddhist philosophy. The process of dialogue consists of three stages or phases: (1) pre‐dialogue; (2) dialogue; (3) post‐dialogue. Suggestions and techniques are offered for each phase and as to how to synthesize the three stages into a ‘whole’ dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Spoken medical dialogue is a valuable source of information for patients and caregivers. This work presents a first step towards automatic analysis and summarization of spoken medical dialogue. We first abstract a dialogue into a sequence of semantic categories using linguistic and contextual features integrated in a supervised machine-learning framework. Our model has a classification accuracy of 73%, compared to 33% achieved by a majority baseline (p <0.01). We then describe and implement a summarizer that utilizes this automatically induced structure. Our evaluation results indicate that automatically generated summaries exhibit high resemblance to summaries written by humans. In addition, task-based evaluation shows that physicians can reasonably answer questions related to patient care by looking at the automatically generated summaries alone, in contrast to the physicians’ performance when they were given summaries from a naïve summarizer (p <0.05). This work demonstrates the feasibility of automatically structuring and summarizing spoken medical dialogue. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The main aim of this study was to provide a detailed examination of the nature of the messages that adolescent boys and girls receive about their bodies. Forty adolescent boys and 40 adolescent girls participated in an in-depth interview to gain an understanding of the range of potential ‘sources’ of body-related messages. Messages were organized around the source of these messages (self, mother, father, brother, sister, female friends, male friends, media). There were consistent gender differences in the way that adolescents received and interpreted messages about their bodies. Overall girls received more positive and more negative messages than boys did. Boys reported having received virtually no negative messages from most people. The content of internal dialogue among adolescents revealed that messages about the body could be interpreted, distorted, and deflected. The implications of these findings for preventing body image-related problems and disordered eating among adolescents are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article aims to analyze conversation exchanges in Orwell''s classic as discourse instances where power, hierarchy and politeness are deeply interwoven. In Oceania – the ultimate example of the individual''s denial – characters behave, linguistically and otherwise, according to strict norms, which reify built-in social and interpersonal asymmetries. This article focuses on these asymmetries and, more specifically, looks into the way dialogues are structured, so as to shed some light on the extent to which hierarchy and power are linguistically determined. Brown and Levinson''s pragmatic theory of politeness (1987) and later contributions provide the analytical tools to guide this approach, which correspondingly analyses the range of face-threatening acts performed, the forms of redressive action taken to counter those threats and the reasons and goals underlying the use of such forms. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: It is argued in the article that strategies of politeness, while needed, are not sufficient by themselves to give a realistic picture of verbal interaction. Work on strategies of impoliteness is not new, but a new type of strategy of unpleasant verbal behavior is identified in the article that goes beyond “mere” impoliteness. The strategy is illustrated by drawing on an episode in Shakespeare''s tragedy Timon of Athens. The discussion makes use of the notions of first order and second order speaker intentions, to explicate the nature of the strategy. The strategy is at the high end of impoliteness and the label “aggravated impoliteness” is suggested for the new strategy. Some features are identified that prototypically go with this type of impoliteness. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The goal of dialogue management in a spoken dialogue system is to take actions based on observations and inferred beliefs. To ensure that the actions optimize the performance or robustness of the system, researchers have turned to reinforcement learning methods to learn policies for action selection. To derive an optimal policy from data, the dynamics of the system is often represented as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), which assumes that the state of the dialogue depends only on the previous state and action. In this article, we investigate whether constraining the state space by the Markov assumption, especially when the structure of the state space may be unknown, truly affords the highest reward. In simulation experiments conducted in the context of a dialogue system for interacting with a speech-enabled web browser, models under the Markov assumption did not perform as well as an alternative model which classifies the total reward with accumulating features. We discuss the implications of the study as well as its limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a multi-modal corpus of hand-annotated meeting dialogues that was designed for studying addressing behaviour in face-to-face conversations. The corpus contains annotated dialogue acts, addressees, adjacency pairs and gaze direction. First, we describe the corpus design where we present the meetings collection, annotation scheme and annotation tools. Then, we present the analysis of the reproducibility and stability of the annotation scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spoken dialogue systems (SDSs) can be used to operate devices, e.g. in the automotive environment. People using these systems usually have different levels of experience. However, most systems do not take this into account. In this paper, we present a method to build a dialogue system in an automotive environment that automatically adapts to the user’s experience with the system. We implemented the adaptation in a prototype and carried out exhaustive tests. Our usability tests show that adaptation increases both user performance and user satisfaction. We describe the tests that were performed, and the methods used to assess the test results. One of these methods is a modification of PARADISE, a framework for evaluating the performance of SDSs [Walker MA, Litman DJ, Kamm CA, Abella A (Comput Speech Lang 12(3):317–347, 1998)]. We discuss its drawbacks for the evaluation of SDSs like ours, the modifications we have carried out, and the test results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Natasa Jovanovic, Rieks op den Akker and Anton Nijholt on data resources and their annotation and another by Tim Paek and David Maxwell Chickering on reinforcement learning for spoken language dialogue management.

DialogDesigner is an integrated design and development environment that supports dialogue designers in creating an electronic dialogue model, writing dialogue snippets, running and analysing simulation sessions, getting graphical views of the model, making automatic evaluation regarding dialogue model well-formedness, compiling the model into run-time code, and extracting different presentations. DialogDesigner has been used for research purposes as well as in commercial projects. Its primary focus is on providing support for the development process. We explain underlying ideas, illustrate the functionality of DialogDesigner and discuss its strengths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we address the issue of generating in-domain language model training data when little or no real user data are available. The two-stage approach taken begins with a data induction phase whereby linguistic constructs from out-of-domain sentences are harvested and integrated with artificially constructed in-domain phrases. After some syntactic and semantic filtering, a large corpus of synthetically assembled user utterances is induced. In the second stage, two sampling methods are explored to filter the synthetic corpus to achieve a desired probability distribution of the semantic content, both on the sentence level and on the class level. The first method utilizes user simulation technology, which obtains the probability model via an interplay between a probabilistic user model and the dialogue system. The second method synthesizes novel dialogue interactions from the raw data by modelling after a small set of dialogues produced by the developers during the course of system refinement. Evaluation is conducted on recognition performance in a restaurant information domain. We show that a partial match to usage-appropriate semantic content distribution can be achieved via user simulations. Furthermore, word error rate can be reduced when limited amounts of in-domain training data are augmented with synthetic data derived by our methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the memoirs of loss as a healing art of hope and love of five palliative caregivers. The palliative caregivers provide personal and professional biographies to a dialogical account of the healing art of palliative care. The caregiver's memoirs of loss would include fashion, photography, performance arts, magic rituals and sacred stones. The study features four exemplary memoirs that depict diverse art forms at the bedside and with the bereaved as pedagogies of hope and love. The four memoirs, presented as narratives, are analyzed using the unique dialogue theorizing approach. It concluded with a summary on the implications of the memoirs for popular education.

Presents the minutes of the general meeting of the International Association for Dialogue Analysis in Bucharest, Romania on May 28, 2005, which discussed various issues including officials correspondence, elections of officers, membership fees and future activities.

Stories are a fundamental dimension of human experience and nursing practice. Story theory describes a narrative happening that occurs through intentional nurse-person dialogue. Seven inquiry phases are associated with story theory, including gathering the story, reconstructing the story, connecting it to the literature, naming the complicating health challenge, describing the story plot, identifying movement toward resolving, and gathering additional stories. This article describes the use of story theory to advance nursing practice scholarship in both academic and everyday nursing practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper explains how the linguistic data of Tiberian Hebrew can be presented in a typological format that facilitates linguistic research. The format, which is in accord with internationally accepted standards used in language typology, facilitates dialogue between Hebrew studies and general linguistics, and hence allows both disciplines to contribute more substantially to each other. There is of course variation in both glossing methods and its application to any particular language. The present paper therefore explains some of the variations in the format and more importantly, important variations in the understanding of Tiberian Hebrew. The paper is not intended as an analysis of Tiberian Hebrew from a typological perspective; rather, it presents the principles of typological glossing and their application to Tiberian Hebrew. Readers who choose to adopt such a format need to adapt it to their theoretical perspectives and pedagogical requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on examples of interview material out of several of our research projects we show how the phenomenon of interest is represented in the research situation itself. Interaction processes between interviewee and interviewer are interpreted as gauges of a reality beyond the research situation, since these interaction processes are also part of everyday communications. Using this perspective, we demonstrate how issues of interest are discussed and bargained in the interview itself. Using the methodology of Hermeneutic Dialogue Analyses we perceive interview data not as something indicating bits of reality lying outside the research situation but as in-vivo-data of actual social reality to be researched and interpreted. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0302320

Focuses on the dialogue between Banquo and Macbeth in the opening scene of the second act of the play "Macbeth" by William Shakespeare. Interpretation on the lines of conversation between Banquo and Macbeth; Answer to the question on the appointment of Macduff by King Duncan to wake him in the morning instead of appointing someone who was going to be sleeping inside the castle; Reason behind Shakespeare's decision to include Macbeth in the scene when the King's body was found.

Pointing was shown to focus attention in dialogue. Pairs of people talked and gestured to identify targets from arrays visible to both of them. Arrays were located at five distances: arm length (0 cm), 25 cm, 50 cm, 75 cm, and 100 cm. Some pairs could point; others could not. People relied more on pointing and less on language as distance decreased. Pointing especially suppressed descriptions of target location, suggesting that it was used to focus attention on a spatial region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the conceptions of literary history found in Tacitus' Dialogus. It argues that the speeches in the work, despite being directly at variance with one another in other respects, develop between them with increasing sophistication a single account of literary history, with a complex interrelation of aesthetic and political factors. However, when one seeks to slot the Dialogus itself into that account, one finds that the form in which the work is written appears to challenge the very analysis that it has developed. The paper concludes by looking at the implications of this for the interpretationof the Dialogus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores some of the theoretical underpinnings of radical approaches to student voice and examines a number of practical issues we need to address if we wish to move towards a more transformative future. The framework within which the notion of voice is explored and critiqued falls primarily into two categories. The first, Deconstructing the presumptions of the present , explores the largely ignored problematic of much student voice work. (1) 'Problems of speaking about others', (2) 'Problems of speaking for others', and problems of (3) 'Getting heard' reveal a range of issues that need to be better understood and acknowledged. The second, On the necessity of dialogue , attempts a resolution, exploring the possibility of (4) 'Speaking about/for others in supportive ways' before offering the preferred (5) 'Dialogic alternative: speaking with rather than for' and further developing that line of enquiry through (6) 'Students as co/researchers'. Finally, (7) 'Recalcitrant realities, new opportunities' offers some ambivalent, but still hopeful thoughts about current realities and future possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses ways to resolve conflicts between generations through dialogue in Russia. Details on the axiom of social progress; Changes in the character of the continuity; Discussion of the field of social policy.

Presents an author's ideas regarding a Buddhist-Marxist dialogue. Rehabilitation of the thinking of Karl Marx in terms of humanistic Marxism; Attempts on the Buddhist side to make common cause with the Communists; Aim to establish a just and equitable society.