Dublin Computational Linguistics Research Seminar

The second of this year's talks in the Dublin Computational
Linguistics Research Seminar DCLRS series will by given this week by
Dr. Ielka van der Sluis of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation
at Trinity College Dublin.

This year the DCLRS series is being organized by the Artificial
Intelligence Research Centre (AIRC) in DIT, and is generously
supported by the CNGL and the DIT School of Computing.

The talk will take place in KE 308 in Kevin Street @ 16.00. Tea and biscuits
to be provided!




--- Speaker:
Dr. Ielka van der Sluis. Centre for Next Generation Localisation,
Trinity College Dublin.

--- Title:
Cross-Cultural Assessment of Automatically Generated Multimodal
Referring Expressions in a Virtual World.

--- Abstract
This talk presents a cross-cultural evaluation of an algorithm for
generating multimodal referring expressions to be produced by embodied
conversational agents in a virtual world. The algorithm employs a cost
function to implement general principles of
human motor control and cooperativity in dialogues that can be
parametrised so as to vary the precision of the pointing gestures and
the amount of linguistic information included in the referring
expressions. The study evaluated how native speakers of English and
Japanese perceived three different algorithmic outputs for multimodal
referring behaviour. Results show differences between English- and
Japanese-speaking subjects with respect to their preferences for types
of multimodal referring expressions. In the talk these differences are
related to matters of understandability, human-likeness and
culture-specific social practices. Methodological issues arising from
the translation and localisation of the materials used in the study as
well as its background and preparations are also addressed.

This research is supported by the Science Foundation Ireland (Grant
07/CE/I1142) as part of the Centre for Next Generation Localisation
(www.cngl.ie) at Trinity College Dublin.

KEYWORDS: generating referring expressions, multimodality, virtual
worlds, realisation of referring expressions, dialogue, translation,
cross-cultural differences, social practices.


--- Time and Location:
KE308, Kevin Street @ 16.00, Friday 29th of October