Language Multimodal Interaction And Transaction

Xuehua Xiang examines multimodal interaction in the marketplace in a multilingual town at the juncture of urbanization in Southern China. Using a collection of data that span nearly 20 years from ethnographic fieldwork, Language, Multimodal Interaction and Transaction: Studies of a Southern Chinese marketplace analyzes multimodal talk-in-interaction in the traditional marketplace as both an economic mechanism and a localized social space. Focusing on how buyers and sellers interact to complete transactions as marketplace shifts from sedimentations of road-side peddling to centralized built space and further to corporate e-commerce, Xiang takes into account the Janus nature of language as both incurring transaction costs and a powerful tool of information and control. By analyzing the socializing functions of language in the marketplace outside of and beyond economic dealings, the study additionally documents and depicts the roles of affect and morality in marketplace encounters. The study offers an overarching framework for future research on the mediating role of language and multimodal interaction in economic activities as well as on the interplay of information, knowledge, affect and morality in social encounters.

This book is based on contributions to the Seventh European Summer School on Language and Speech Communication that was held at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden, in July of 1999 under the auspices of the European Language and Speech Network (ELSNET). The topic of the summer school was "Multimodality in Language and Speech Systems" (MiLaSS). The issue of multimodality in interpersonal, face-to-face communication has been an important research topic for a number of years. With the increasing sophistication of computer-based interactive systems using language and speech, the topic of multimodal interaction has received renewed interest both in terms of human-human interaction and human-machine interaction. Nine lecturers contri buted to the summer school with courses on specialized topics ranging from the technology and science of creating talking faces to human-human communication, which is mediated by computer for the handicapped. Eight of the nine lecturers are represented in this book. The summer school attracted more than 60 participants from Europe, Asia and North America representing not only graduate students but also senior researchers from both academia and industry.

A practical guide to understanding and investigating the multiple modes of communication, verbal and non-verbal. Sets out clear methodology to help readers conduct their own analysis and includes many real examples.

Using Chinese Classics for Intercultural Communicative Competence presents new strategies and tools for integrating Mandarin language teaching with fostering intercultural competencies through contemporary, global lenses on Chinese classic texts. Chinese classic texts are canonical works in Chinese culture published before 1911. They offer a window into deeply held cultural values which learners of the Chinese language would benefit from studying to facilitate meaningful intercultural dialogues. With chapters covering classic Chinese texts, such as Journey to the West, Dream of the Red Chamber, and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, this book will demonstrate the value, importance, and feasibility of teaching Chinese classic works for ICC development in the Chinese world language classroom, and equip teachers with carefully planned, classroom-tested lesson models that demonstrate the innovative, integrative models advocated in this book. This book will be valuable for pre- and in-service Mandarin Chinese teachers across various institutional settings at different levels, looking for ready materials and professional development resources. The book can also be used as core material for teacher training programs.

Most dialogues are multimodal. When people talk, they use not only their voices, but also facial expressions and other gestures, and perhaps even touch. When computers communicate with people, they use pictures and perhaps sounds, together with textual language, and when people communicate with computers, they are likely to use mouse “gestures” almost as much as words. How are such multimodal dialogues constructed? This is the main question addressed in this selection of papers of the second “Venaco Workshop”, sponsored by the NATO Research Study Group RSG-10 on Automatic Speech Processing, and by the European Speech Communication Association (ESCA).

This volume presents high quality, state-of-the-art research ideas and results from theoretic, algorithmic and application viewpoints. It contains contributions by leading experts in the obsequious scientific and technological field of multimedia. The book specifically focuses on interaction with multimedia content with special emphasis on multimodal interfaces for accessing multimedia information. The book is designed for a professional audience composed of practitioners and researchers in industry. It is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First International Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction, MLMI 2004, held in Martigny, Switzerland in June 2004. The 30 revised full papers presented were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and revision. The papers are organized in topical sections on HCI and applications, structuring and interaction, multimodal processing, speech processing, dialogue management, and vision and emotion.

The Handbook of Multimodal-Multisensor Interfaces provides the first authoritative resource on what has become the dominant paradigm for new computer interfaces-user input involving new media (speech, multi-touch, hand and body gestures, facial expressions, writing) embedded in multimodal-multisensor interfaces. This three-volume handbook is written by international experts and pioneers in the field. It provides a textbook, reference, and technology roadmap for professionals working in this and related areas. This third volume focuses on state-of-the-art multimodal language and dialogue processing, including semantic integration of modalities. The development of increasingly expressive embodied agents and robots has become an active test bed for coordinating multimodal dialogue input and output, including processing of language and nonverbal communication. In addition, major application areas are featured for commercializing multimodal-multisensor systems, including automotive, robotic, manufacturing, machine translation, banking, communications, and others. These systems rely heavily on software tools, data resources, and international standards to facilitate their development. For insights into the future, emerging multimodal-multisensor technology trends are highlighted in medicine, robotics, interaction with smart spaces, and similar areas. Finally, this volume discusses the societal impact of more widespread adoption of these systems, such as privacy risks and how to mitigate them. The handbook chapters provide a number of walk-through examples of system design and processing, information on practical resources for developing and evaluating new systems, and terminology and tutorial support for mastering this emerging field. In the final section of this volume, experts exchange views on a timely and controversial challenge topic, and how they believe multimodal-multisensor interfaces need to be equipped to most effectively advance human performance during the next decade.

This book presents a different approach to pattern recognition (PR) systems, in which users of a system are involved during the recognition process. This can help to avoid later errors and reduce the costs associated with post-processing. The book also examines a range of advanced multimodal interactions between the machine and the users, including handwriting, speech and gestures. Features: presents an introduction to the fundamental concepts and general PR approaches for multimodal interaction modeling and search (or inference); provides numerous examples and a helpful Glossary; discusses approaches for computer-assisted transcription of handwritten and spoken documents; examines systems for computer-assisted language translation, interactive text generation and parsing, relevance-based image retrieval, and interactive document layout analysis; reviews several full working prototypes of multimodal interactive PR applications, including live demonstrations that can be publicly accessed on the Internet.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Machine Learning for Multimodal Interaction, MLMI 2007, held in Brno, Czech Republic, in June 2007. The 25 revised full papers presented together with 1 invited paper were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and revision from 60 workshop presentations. The papers are organized in topical sections on multimodal processing, HCI, user studies and applications, image and video processing, discourse and dialogue processing, speech and audio processing, as well as the PASCAL speech separation challenge.