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SUMMARY:Icelandic language and culture training application - Branislav B
 édi\, University of Iceland\, CADIA Research Centre
DTSTART:20151102T160000Z
DTEND:20151102T173000Z
UID:TALK62012@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Andrew Caines
DESCRIPTION:In the first part\, I would like to talk about how strangers i
 nitiate a conversation during first encounters when they meet and ask for 
 directions to a specific place. Unlike in situations where participants kn
 ow each other\, and where a greeting phase often fulfills the function of 
 noticing and acknowledging one’s presence and initiating a conversation\
 , situations where strangers meet call for something different. As a resul
 t of a small research conducted in the field\, the Explicit Announcement o
 f Presence (EAP) (Kendon\, 1990) has been identified as the communicative 
 function\, which has been implemented into the application Virtual Reykjav
 ik. It will enable human users to experience the interaction with embodied
  conversational agents (ECAs) in a more natural manner. In this game-like 
 environment\, one of the objectives the users (learners) have to complete 
 is to approach agents (virtual characters) and initiate a conversation. Th
 e purpose of our research was to describe the natural language as it is us
 ed rather than interpret the meaning of words used by the speakers. Exampl
 es regarding vocabulary\, sentence patterns and multimodal behaviour (head
 \, gaze\, torso\, body posture) will be presented.\n\nIn the second part\,
  I would like to talk about how agents initiate a speech repair by human u
 sers in a more realistic way\, i.e. by employing verbal and nonverbal (mul
 timodal) features of natural language found in face-to-face conversations 
 between humans. Utterances that initiate such repairs are often used for a
 voiding misunderstanding and keeping the flow of a conversation\; they can
  have various names\, e.g. requests for clarification (Duncan & Niederehe\
 , 1974)\, Next Turn Repair Initiators (Schegloff\, 1992)\, or in technical
  terminology they are also known as ReqRepairs (Traum & Allen\, 1992). In 
 the context of this project\, the term clarification request (CR) (Purver\
 , 2004) has been adopted. I will demonstrate\, what kind of CRs are often 
 used in first encounters between native and non-native speakers of Iceland
 ic in situations when strangers meet and ask for directions to a specific 
 place in downtown Reykjavik\, and show their multimodal realization on sel
 ected examples from our video corpus.
LOCATION:Room SR-24\, English Faculty Building\, Sidgwick Site
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