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Humans are known to use a wide range of non-verbal behaviour while speaking. Generating naturalistic embodied speech for an artificial agent is therefore an application where techniques that draw directly on recorded human motions can be helpful. We present a system that uses corpus-based selection strategies to specify the head and eyebrow motion of an animated talking head. We first describe how a domain-specific corpus of facial displays was recorded and annotated, and outline the regularities that were found in the data. We then present two different methods of selecting motions for the talking head based on the corpus data: one that chooses the majority option in all cases, and one that makes a weighted choice among all of the options. We compare these methods to each other in two ways: through cross-validation against the corpus, and by asking human judges to rate the output. The results of the two evaluation studies differ: the cross-validation study favoured the majority strategy, while the human judges preferred schedules generated using weighted choice. The judges in the second study also showed a preference for the original corpus data over the output of either of the generation strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent does the wording and syntactic form of people's writing reflect their personalities? Using a bottom-up stratified corpus comparison, rather than the top-down content analysis techniques that have been used before, we examine a corpus of e-mail messages elicited from individuals of known personality, as measured by the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire–Revised (S. Eysenck, Eysenck, & Barrett, 1985). This method allowed us to isolate linguistic features associated with different personality types, via both word and part-of-speech n-gram analysis. We investigated the extent to which extraversion is associated with linguistic features involving positivity, sociability, complexity, and implicitness and neuroticism is associated with negativity, self-concern, emphasis, and implicitness. Numerous interesting features were uncovered. For instance, higher levels of extraversion involved a preference for adjectives, whereas lower levels of neuroticism involved a preference for adverbs. However, neither positivity nor negativity was as prominent as expected, and there was little evidence for implicitness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Electronic media are pervasive in daily communication. But how well do personality ratings of short e-mail messages match the self-reports of the authors? Here we describe a small-scale preliminary study to test this. Working independently and under experimenter supervision, 30 judges each rated 18 short e-mail texts. These texts were written under experimental conditions by authors of known personality, who briefly described their recent activities, and were collected as part of a previous study, which demonstrated linguistic projection of personality. Even with minimal textual cues there is relatively high agreement for ratings of Extraversion, with lesser agreement for Psychoticism. However, agreement for Neuroticism ratings, especially between target and judges, appears to be further reduced by the environment. In addition to demonstrating agreement in asynchronous—rather than synchronous—computer-mediated communication, this study adopts the three-factor model of personality and uses exemplar-based and subjective measures of personality perception. We note the need for further research. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article seeks to explore the possibility of minimizing the role of discourse topic (DT). Nick Asher states that discourse topics for narration in SDRT should summarize and abstract away from the logical structure of the constituents they are topics of. For a variety of purposes they are also needed as constituents in the discourse structure. Asher thus cites two traditional roles for DT, and expands another one. The traditional roles are in the semantics of Narration, to explain the incoherence of discourses containing Narration; and in constraining attachment, to explain how some parts of discourse are closed off for attachment. The expanded role is in plural anaphora, explaining resolution possibilities. The rest of this paper discusses these roles in turn, arguing in each case that DT's role could be reduced still further.

Moser and Moore (1995, to appear) carried out a corpus study of discourse cues in tutorial dialogue. Their annotation uses Relational Discourse Analysis (RDA), which distinguishes core elements (nuclei-like) from contributors (satellite-like). In their discussion of these results, Moser and Moore propose that clauses in the contributor-core order are harder to understand than clauses in core-contributor order, but do not attempt to explain why the "hard" order is ever used. Here, we recruit evidence from work by Stevenson and her collaborators, which substantiates the empirical claim. We then suggest that by distinguishing information structure (given-new) from intentional structure (core-contributor), we can explain why hard orders are surprisingly frequent. We note, however, that this cannot be the whole story, and show how the hierarchical RDA structure helps account for differences between discourse cues such as since, so, this means, and therefore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the reverse wh-clefts in oral discourse. Discussion on the distinctive features of the construction of the speech; Information structure of the reverse wh-cleft; Characteristic of reverse wh-clefts to presuppose information that is new to both discourse and hearer.

In this paper, we present an account of the interpretation of it-cleft constructions that attempts to draw together the apparently diverse factors of aspect, information structure, syntax, and presupposition. We begin with the observation (due to Prince 1978) that some clefts have the effect of "backgrounding" the information they convey, and that, in addition, clefts appear to indicate that this information is in some sense "known fact." We also add the observation that in some contexts clefts can induce temporal reversals in the interpretation of the narrative order of events and note that clefts appear to limit the range of coherence relations that can be inferred bet wan their content and that of the preceding discourse. We argue that these effects arise out of the way cleft content is incorporated into the existing discourse context; further, we suggest that the integration of cleft con tent is further influenced by the individual semantic, pragmatic, and informational profile of the cleft concerned. Our account draws on the notion of clefts as state-making devices: that is, they introduce an eventuality description with stative aspect, due to the presence of copular be as main verb. We look at the implications this has for discourse processing, showing how the interpretation of the cleft's stative main verb as temporally overlapping an established reference time has effects on the integration of cleft content into the discourse model While this aspectual profile is common to all clefts, integration is further influenced by whether the cleft's presupposition contains material already known to the hearer (topic) or new (comment). While we cannot provide a complete model of discourse and temporal relations, we hope to show that the specific discourse relations taken to hold between incoming and existing information depend on a subtle interaction between a range of factors that influence the integration process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opinion. Comments on a study of computation, representation and the limits of uninformed learning. Approaches in transforming problem types; Awareness of definite cases; Active construction of external representations.

Introduces articles related to speech published in the April 1996 issue of the book "Language and Speech."

Text mining and information visualization techniques applied to large-scale historical and literary document collections have enabled new types of humanities research. The assumption behind such efforts is often that trends will emerge from the analysis despite errors for individual data points and that noise will be dominated by the signal in the data. However, for some text analysis tasks, the technology is unable to perform as well as domain experts, perhaps because it does not have sufficient world knowledge or metadata available. Yet, the advantage of language processing technology is that it can process at scale, even if not perfectly accurately. Geo-locating literary works is one example where human expert knowledge is invaluable when it comes to distinguishing between candidate works. This was the underlying assumption in Palimpsest, an interdisciplinary digital humanities research project on mining literary Edinburgh. From the outset, the project adopted an assisted curation process whereby the automatic processing of large data collections was combined with manual checking to identify literary works set in Edinburgh. In this article, we introduce the assisted curation process and evaluate how the feedback from literary scholars helped to improve the technology, thereby highlighting the importance of placing humanities research at the core of digital humanities projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the levels of representation in cognitive linguistics. Syntax and semantics of individual sentences; Discourse function of syntactic constructions; Parameterization of discourse relations; Directions for interdisciplinary work on discourse relations.

This paper investigates the relationship between focusing and coherence relations in pronoun comprehension. In their focusing model of pronoun comprehension, Stevenson, Crawley and Kleinman (1994) proposed a default focus on the thematic role associated with the consequences of a described event, a focus that may be modified by the attention-directing properties of a subsequent connective. In this paper we examine a second function of connectives: that of signalling the coherence relations between two clauses (e.g., a NARRATIVE relation or a RESULT relation). In three studies, we identified the coherence relations between sentence fragments ending in pronouns and participants’ continuations to the fragments. We then examined the relationship between the coherence relation, the preferred referent of the pronoun and the referent’s thematic role. The results of studies 1 and 2 showed that people aim to keep the focused entity, the coherence relation and the referent of the pronoun in alignment. Study 3 included the connective next, which enabled us to generate different predictions for the roles of focusing and coherence relations in pronoun resolution. The results favoured the focusing view. The preferred referent of the pronoun was the focused, first mentioned, individual, whereas the coherence relation was consistent with the thematic role of the pronominal referent. If the pronoun referred to an Agent, a NARRATIVE relation was preferred, if the pronoun referred to a Patient, a RESULT relation was preferred. Discussion of these and other results led to the following conclusions. First, pronoun resolution is primarily determined by focusing, either semantic or structural, although a range of other features, including coherence relations and verb semantics, may also act as pressures on pronoun resolution. Second, the consistent link we observed between thematic roles and coherence relations may provide a mapping between a represented entity and a represented event. Third, the connectives we used have three distinct functions: an attention directing function, a function for constraining the possible coherence relation between two events, and a function for interpreting a clause as having either a causal or a temporal structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a reasonable amount of work has gone into automatically geoparsing text at the city or higher levels of granularity for different types of texts in different domains, there is relatively little research on geoparsing fine-grained locations such as buildings, green spaces and street names in text. This paper reports on how the Edinburgh Geoparser performs on this task for different types of literary text set in Edinburgh, the first UNESCO City of Literature. The non-copyrighted gold standard datasets created for this purpose are released along with this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we discuss several metrics of coherence defined using centering theory and investigate the usefulness of such metrics for information ordering in automatic text generation. We estimate empirically which is the most promising metric and how useful this metric is using a general methodology applied on several corpora. Our main result is that the simplest metric (which relies exclusively on NOCB transitions) sets a robust baseline that cannot be outperformed by other metrics which make use of additional centering-based features. This baseline can be used for the development of both text-to-text and concept-to-text generation systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been suggested that iconic graphical signs evolve into symbolic graphical signs through repeated usage. This article reports a series of interactive graphical communication experiments using a 'pictionary' task to establish the conditions under which the evolution might occur. Experiment 1 rules out a simple repetition based account in favor of an account that requires feedback and interaction between communicators. Experiment 2 shows how the degree of interaction affects the evolution of signs according to a process of grounding. Experiment 3 confirms the prediction that those not involved directly in the interaction have trouble interpreting the graphical signs produced in Experiment 1. On the basis of these results, this article argues that icons evolve into symbols as a consequence of the systematic shift in the locus of information from the sign to the users' memory of the sign's usage supported by an interactive grounding process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]