31.2340, Calls: Applied Ling, Comp Ling/Switzerland

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-2340. Wed Jul 22 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.2340, Calls: Applied Ling, Comp Ling/Switzerland

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Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2020 11:48:20
From: Anna Danielewicz-Betz [anna.danielewicz.betz at gmail.com]
Subject: Pragmatics of H2M, M2M, and automated H2H communication

 
Full Title: Pragmatics of H2M, M2M, and automated H2H communication 

Date: 28-Jun-2021 - 02-Jul-2021
Location: Winterthur, Switzerland 
Contact Person: Anna Danielewicz-Betz
Meeting Email: anna.danielewicz.betz at gmail.com

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; Computational Linguistics 

Call Deadline: 25-Oct-2020 

Meeting Description:

Guzman (2018, p. 3) states that in H2M communication, technology is
conceptualised as more than a channel or medium: it enters into the role of a
communicator with its own agency, subjectivity, and presence. Interactions
with AI-enabled devices and programs are dynamic rather than static,
temporarily and contextually embedded (Guzman & Lewis, 2020). Automation of
written communication (e.g. Lewis et al., 2019) is also taking place, whereby
intentionality of algorithm-driven ‘default’ interaction should perhaps be
questioned.

Although a number of computer scientists and computational linguists have
shown some interest in applying the pragmatic framework not only to H2H
communication (see, e.g., Moldovan, 2011 on automatic speech act tagging;
Weisser, 2014 on speech act annotation), but also to the classification and
evaluation of H2M communication (cf., e.g. Bernsen et al., 1996 on
cooperativity; Babu et al., 2006; Edwards et al., 2016; Liu et al., 2016;
Radziwill & Benton, 2017 on evaluation of conversational quality; Allison et
al. 2018 on evaluation of human speech in H2M for supervised machine learning;
Hanna & Richards, 2019 on evaluation of locutionary, illocutionary, and
perlocutionary acts in the agent’s verbal communication), there is relatively
little evidence of collaboration with linguists conducting research in
Pragmatics, and new research topic present themselves every day, given the
ongoing technological advancements. 

As pragmatics constitutes a serious challenge to computational linguistics
(consider, e.g., vagueness, indirectness, humour, irony, rudeness), one of the
main difficulties when developing conversational agents is modelling the
ability to ‘cooperate’ (Saygin & Cicekli, 2002). Saygin & Cicekli (ibid.)
investigated the violation of Grice’s conversational maxims by computers,
stating that without any adherence to those maxims, there would not be much
communication and that the principles guiding human-computer conversation
different from those guiding inter-human communication (ibid., p. 230).
Yamaguchi et al. (2018), on the other hand, pointed out the challenges posed
by human users who tend to flout or violate both conversational and politeness
maxims when interacting with chatbots, switching to the judgemental
‘evaluation mode’, which hinders conversational flow and ‘confuses’ the
conversational agent.

Potential areas of investigation:
 - Automated journalism
 - Automated messaging (both social and corporate environments)
 - Automated communication on professional social networking platforms
 - Avatar-based marketing/customer service communication
 - Chatbots/vocal social agents/digital assistants/social bots
 - Construction of the ‘other’/technical identity
 - (Embodied) robots, humanoids
 - Expression of emotions towards machine agent/interlocutor
 - Fake news, fake reviews and misinformation - trolls, bots, and cyborgs
 - Streaming services (relevance, customisation, and recommendation)
 - Video/computer games: interaction with non-player intelligent characters


Call for Contributions: 

This is a call for panel contributions, both theoretical and empirical
(primary/secondary data-driven, qualitative/quantitative) related to
human-to-machine (H2M), machine-to-machine (M2M), and (semi-) automated
communication. In particular, researchers representing the following fields
are invited to submit their abstracts:

 - Interdisciplinary Applied Linguistics/Pragmatics
 - Computational Linguistics
 - Computer Science
 - Philosophy of H2M communication
 - Cognitive Science

Note that the session start and end dates are preliminary.




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