www.christinehowes.com

IncReD aims to investigate incremental human reasoning in dialogue by combining insights from different fields involved in dialogue research (e.g. Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Psychology).  We will experimentally test how dialogue participants dynamically and incrementally update their common ground and reason using this information, and develop a model to account for our findings. This project will integrate state of the art experimental techniques, corpus methods and formal models from syntactic, semantic and pragmatic domains into a model of dialogue.

Specifically we will investigate:
(1) How do people respond to why-questions in dialogue? What does this tell us about the reasoning people do in dialogue, and the resources they use?
(2) What happens in a dialogue (linguistically and interactionally) when there is a mismatch in the resources for reasoning between participants?
(3) How can this incremental human reasoning ability be formally modelled?

Our research into incremental reasoning will address foundational questions in dialogue research and feed into the field of AI where it may be utilised in applications such as artificial companions for the elderly. This project also has important implications for understanding reasoning in practical dialogic situations, for example, in therapy dialogues where a mismatch in reasoning between a psychiatrist and patient can have potentially catastrophic consequences.

The project is being funded by VR, the Swedish Research council (2016-01162) between 2017 and 2020.

The project plan can be accessed here.

2023

Breitholtz, E., Howes, C. & Cooper, R. (2023). All the more reasons: Mismatches in topoi in dialogue. Journal of Pragmatics, 217, 172-184. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

2022

Berman, A. & Howes, C (2022). "Apparently acousticness is positively correlated with neuroticism": Conversational explanations of model predictions. In Proceedings of the 26th Workshop On the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (DubDial) - Poster Abstracts, pages 233-235. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Cooper, R., Ginzburg, J. & Larsson, S (2022). Learning Language Games Probabilistically: From Crying to Compositionality. In Bernardy, J-P, Blanck, R, Chatzikyriakidis, S et al (editors), Probabilistic Approaches to Linguistic Theory. CSLI Publications. [More] [Bibtex]

Cooper, R. (2023). From Perception to Communication: a Theory of Types for Action and Meaning. Oxford : Oxford University Press. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Eshghi, A., Howes, C. & Gregoromichelaki, E (2022). Action coordination and learning in dialogue. In Bernardy, J-P, Blanck, R, Chatzikyriakidis, S et al (editors), Probabilistic Approaches to Linguistic Theory. CSLI Publications. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Howes, C (2022). Putting the dialogue into dialogue modelling - Invited talk. In Proceedings of the Young Researchers Roundtable on Spoken Dialogue Systems. [More] [Slides] [Bibtex]

Maraev, V. (2022). Who is laughing now? Laughter-infused dialogue systems. Phd Thesis. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Noble, W., Maraev, V. & Breitholtz, E (2022). Probabilistic pragmatics: A dialogical perspective. In Bernardy, J-P, Blanck, R, Chatzikyriakidis, S et al (editors), Probabilistic Approaches to Linguistic Theory. CSLI Publications. [More] [Bibtex]

2021

Axelsson-Nord, E., Maraev, V., Breitholtz, E. & Howes, C (2021). What do you mean? Eliciting enthymemes in text-based dialogue. In Proceedings of the 25th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue - Poster Abstracts. SEMDIAL.. [More] [Poster] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Howes, C., Dobnik, S., Breitholtz, E. & Chatzikyriakidis, S. (2021). Proceedings of the Reasoning and Interaction Conference (ReInAct 2021). [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Howes, C. & Eshghi, A. (2021). Feedback relevance spaces: Interactional constraints on processing contexts in Dynamic Syntax. Journal of Logic, Language and Information, 30(2), 331-362. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Howes, C. & Gibson, H. (2021). Dynamic Syntax -- The dynamics of incremental processing: Constraints on underspecification. Journal of Logic, Language and Information, 30(2), 263–276. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Larsson, S. & Cooper, R (2021). Bayesian classification and inference in a probabilistic type theory with records. In Proceedings of the 1st and 2nd Workshops on Natural Logic Meets Machine Learning (NALOMA). [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Maraev, V., Breitholtz, E., Howes, C. & Bernardy, J.-P (2021). Why Should I Turn Left? Towards Active Explainability for Spoken Dialogue Systems. Proceedings of the Reasoning and Interaction Conference (ReInAct 2021). [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Maraev, V., Breitholtz, E., Howes, C., Larsson, S. & Cooper, R. (2021). Something old, something new, something borrowed, something taboo: Interaction and creativity in humour. Frontiers in Psychology. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

2020

Breitholtz, E. (2020). Enthymemes and Topoi in Dialogue: The Use of Common Sense Reasoning in Conversation. Leiden, The Netherlands : Brill. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Breitholtz, E. & Howes, C (2020). Communicable reasons: How children learn topoi through dialogue. In Proceedings of the 24th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue. Waltham, MA : SEMDIAL. [More] [Slides] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Gregoromichelaki, E., Mills, G. J., Howes, C., Eshghi, A., Chatzikyriakidis, S., Purver, M. et al. (2020). Completability vs (In)completeness. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

2019

Breitholtz, E. & Maraev, V (2019). How to put an elephant in the title: modeling humorous incongruity with topoi. In roceedings of the 23rd Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue - Full Papers. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Howes, C. & Eshghi, A (2019). Feedback Relevance Spaces: A Dynamic Syntax account of dialogue data. In The third Dynamic Syntax conference. [More] [Slides] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Howes, C. & Eshghi, A (2019). Interjection as coordination device: feedback relevance spaces. In 16th International Pragmatics Conference. Hong Kong. [More] [Slides] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

2018

Breitholtz, E. & Cooper, R (2018). Relating coordination in non-linguistic games and dialogue games. In Proceedings of the workshop on Dialogue and Perception. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Breitholtz, E. & Cooper, R (2018). Linking topoi in argumentative dialogue to personae. In roceedings of the 22rd Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue - Poster Abstracts. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Cooper, R. & Larsson, S (2018). Dynamic Syntax in Type Theory with Records. In Conference on Dynamic Syntax. Edinburgh. [More] [Slides] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Ginzburg, J., Cooper, R., Hough, J. & Schlangen, D (2018). Incrementality and clarification/sluicing potential. In Trueswell, R., Cummins, C., Heycock, C. et al (editors), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21, pages 463-480. Linguistic Society of America. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

Purver, M., Hough, J. & Howes, C. (2018). Computational models of miscommunication phenomena. Topics in Cognitive Science, 10(2), 425-451. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

2017

Breitholtz, E., Howes, C. & Cooper, R (2017). Incrementality all the way up. In Computing Natural Language Inference Workshop at the International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS). [More] [Digital version] [Slides] [Bibtex]

Howes, C. & Eshghi, A (2017). Feedback relevance spaces: The organisation of increments in conversation. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2017). Association for Computational Linguisitics. [More] [Digital version] [Poster] [Lightning Slide] [Bibtex]

Howes, C. & Eshghi, A (2017). Formalising backchannel relevance spaces. In The first Dynamic Syntax conference. [More] [Digital version] [Slides] [Bibtex]

Howes, C. & Rieser, H., editors. (2017). Proceedings of the workshop on Formal Approaches to the Dynamics of Linguistic Interaction (FADLI), number 1863, In CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Aachen. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]