marcus colman

Queen Mary, University of London, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Alumnus

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Areas of study:

Dialogue
Mutual-understanding
Mutual-intelligibility
Repair
Ellipsis and anaphora
Experimental methodology
Experimental social psychology
Forced compliance
Supervisors: Professor Patrick G. T. Healey
Address: Maidstone, Kent. UK.

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Quantifying Mutual-Understanding in Dialogue

There are two components of communication that provide a natural index of mutual-understanding in... more There are two components of communication that provide a natural index of mutual-understanding in dialogue. The first is Repair; the ways in which people detect and deal with problems with understanding. The second is Ellipsis/Anaphora; the use of expressions that depend directly on the accessibility of the local context for their interpretation. This thesis explores the use of these two phenomena in systematic comparative analyses of human-human dialogue under different task and media conditions. In order to do this it is necessary to a) develop reliable, valid protocols for coding the different Repair and Ellipsis/Anaphora phenomena b) establish their baseline patterns of distribution in conversation and c) model their basic statistical inter-relationships and their predictive value. Two new protocols for coding Repair and Ellipsis/Anaphora phenomena are presented and applied to two dialogue corpora, one of ordinary 'everyday' conversations and one of task-oriented dialogues. These data illustrate that there are significant differences in how understanding is created and negotiated across conditions. Repair is shown to be a ubiquitous feature in all dialogue. The goals of the speaker directly affect the type of Repair used. Giving instructions leads to a higher rate of self-editing; following instructions increases corrections and requests for clarification. Medium and familiarity also influence Repair; when eye contact is not possible there are a greater number of repeats and clarifications. Anaphora are used less frequently in task-oriented dialogue whereas types of Ellipsis increase. The use of Elliptical phrases that check, confirm or acknowledge is higher when there is no eye contact. Familiar pairs use more elliptical expressions, especially endophora and elliptical questions. Following instructions leads to greater use of elliptical (non-sentential) phrases. Medium, task and social norms all have a measureable effect on the components of dialogue that underpin mutual-understanding.

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Papers by marcus colman

Analysing Multimodal Communication

Advances in Natural Multimodal …, Jan 1, 2005

Abstract There are few techniques available to inform the design of systems to support human-huma... more

Proceedings of the 9th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue}

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Quantifying Ellipsis In Dialogue: An Index of Mutual Understanding

… of the 9th SIGdial Workshop on …, Jan 1, 2008

This paper presents a coding protocol that allows naïve users to annotate dialogue transcripts fo... more This paper presents a coding protocol that allows naïve users to annotate dialogue transcripts for anaphora and ellipsis. Cohen's kappa statistic demonstrates that the protocol is sufficiently robust in terms of reliability. It is proposed that quantitative ellipsis data may be used as an index of mutual-engagement. Current and potential uses of ellipsis coding are described.

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The Distribution of Repair in Dialogue

csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu

Repairs -the various ways in which people edit and reformulate conversational turns-are a charact... more Repairs -the various ways in which people edit and reformulate conversational turns-are a characteristic feature of natural dialogue. However, relatively little is known about their overall frequency or distribution in conversation. We present a systematic, quantitative study of patterns of repair in two corpora: 'ordinary' dialogues from the British National Corpus (BNC) and task-oriented dialogues from the HCRC Map Task. We use this analysis to evaluate three hypotheses about patterns of repair 1) social 'preferences' 2) processing demands and 3) dialogue co-ordination. The results show that repair is more frequent in task-oriented dialogue, that use of repair is broadly unaffected by familiarity or mode of interaction but substantially affected by task roles. We argue that the complimentary patterns of repair used by conversational partners support the view of repairs as an integrated, cross-turn and cross-person, system for sustaining the mutual-intelligibility of dialogue.

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