Christine Howes


2023

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Because is why: Children’s acquisition of topoi through why questions
Christine Howes | Ellen Breitholtz | Vladislav Maraev
Proceedings of the 2023 CLASP Conference on Learning with Small Data (LSD)

In this paper we look at how children learn the underlying principles of commonsense reasoning, sometimes referred to as topoi, which are prevalent in everyday dialogue. By examining the utterances of two children in the CHILDES corpus for whom there is extensive longitudinal data, we show how children can elicit topoi from their parents by asking why-questions. This strategy for the rapid acquisition of topoi peaks at around age three, suggesting that it is a critical step in becoming a fully competent language user.

2021

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Proceedings of the Reasoning and Interaction Conference (ReInAct 2021)
Christine Howes | Simon Dobnik | Ellen Breitholtz | Stergios Chatzikyriakidis
Proceedings of the Reasoning and Interaction Conference (ReInAct 2021)

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Why Should I Turn Left? Towards Active Explainability for Spoken Dialogue Systems.
Vladislav Maraev | Ellen Breitholtz | Christine Howes | Jean-Philippe Bernardy
Proceedings of the Reasoning and Interaction Conference (ReInAct 2021)

In this paper we argue that to make dialogue systems able to actively explain their decisions they can make use of enthymematic reasoning. We motivate why this is an appropriate strategy and integrate it within our own proof-theoretic dialogue manager framework based on linear logic. In particular, this enables a dialogue system to provide reasonable answers to why-questions that query information previously given by the system.

2020

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Proceedings of the Probability and Meaning Conference (PaM 2020)
Christine Howes | Stergios Chatzikyriakidis | Adam Ek | Vidya Somashekarappa
Proceedings of the Probability and Meaning Conference (PaM 2020)

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An Annotation Approach for Social and Referential Gaze in Dialogue
Vidya Somashekarappa | Christine Howes | Asad Sayeed
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper introduces an approach for annotating eye gaze considering both its social and the referential functions in multi-modal human-human dialogue. Detecting and interpreting the temporal patterns of gaze behavior cues is natural for humans and also mostly an unconscious process. However, these cues are difficult for conversational agents such as robots or avatars to process or generate. The key factor is to recognize these variants and carry out a successful conversation, as misinterpretation can lead to total failure of the given interaction. This paper introduces an annotation scheme for eye-gaze in human-human dyadic interactions that is intended to facilitate the learning of eye-gaze patterns in multi-modal natural dialogue.

2017

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Feedback relevance spaces: The organisation of increments in conversation
Christine Howes | Arash Eshghi
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS) — Short papers

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Incrementality all the way up
Ellen Breitholtz | Christine Howes | Robin Cooper
Proceedings of the Computing Natural Language Inference Workshop

2015

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Feedback in Conversation as Incremental Semantic Update
Arash Eshghi | Christine Howes | Eleni Gregoromichelaki | Julian Hough | Matthew Purver
Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computational Semantics

2014

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Linguistic Indicators of Severity and Progress in Online Text-based Therapy for Depression
Christine Howes | Matthew Purver | Rose McCabe
Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: From Linguistic Signal to Clinical Reality

2013

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Investigating Topic Modelling for Therapy Dialogue Analysis
Christine Howes | Matthew Purver | Rose McCabe
Proceedings of the IWCS 2013 Workshop on Computational Semantics in Clinical Text (CSCT 2013)

2012

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Predicting Adherence to Treatment for Schizophrenia from Dialogue Transcripts
Christine Howes | Matthew Purver | Rose McCabe | Patrick G. T. Healey | Mary Lavelle
Proceedings of the 13th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

2009

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Dialogue Modelling and the Remit of Core Grammar
Eleni Gregoromichelaki | Yo Sato | Ruth Kempson | Andrew Gargett | Christine Howes
Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Computational Semantics

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A: An Experimental Investigation into... B: ...Split Utterances
Christine Howes | Patrick Healey | Gregory Mills
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2009 Conference

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Split Utterances in Dialogue: a Corpus Study
Matthew Purver | Christine Howes | Eleni Gregoromichelaki | Patrick Healey
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2009 Conference