Nigel Ward

Also published as: Nigel G. Ward


2024

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A Collection of Pragmatic-Similarity Judgments over Spoken Dialog Utterances
Nigel Ward | Divette Marco
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Automatic measures of similarity between sentences or utterances are invaluable for training speech synthesizers, evaluating machine translation, and assessing learner productions. While there exist measures for semantic similarity and prosodic similarity, there are as yet none for pragmatic similarity. To enable the training of such measures, we developed the first collection of human judgments of pragmatic similarity between utterance pairs. 9 judges listened to 220 utterance pairs, each consisting of an utterance extracted from a recorded dialog and a re-enactment of that utterance under various conditions designed to create various degrees of similarity. Each pair was rated on a continuous scale. The average inter-judge correlation was 0.45. We make this data available at https://github.com/divettemarco/PragSim .

2022

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Using Interaction Style Dimensions to Characterize Spoken Dialog Corpora
Nigel Ward
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

The construction of spoken dialog systems today relies heavily on appropriate corpora, but corpus selection is more an art than a science. As interaction style properties govern many aspects of dialog, they have the potential to be useful for relating and comparing corpora. This paper overviews a recently-developed model of interaction styles and shows how it can be used to identify relevant corpus differences, estimate corpus similarity, and flag likely outlier dialogs.

2021

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Towards Continuous Estimation of Dissatisfaction in Spoken Dialog
Nigel Ward | Jonathan E. Avila | Aaron M. Alarcon
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

We collected a corpus of human-human task-oriented dialogs rich in dissatisfaction and built a model that used prosodic features to predict when the user was likely dissatisfied. For utterances this attained a F.25 score of 0.62,against a baseline of 0.39. Based on qualitative observations and failure analysis, we discuss likely ways to improve this result to make it have practical utility.

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Individual Interaction Styles: Evidence from a Spoken Chat Corpus
Nigel Ward
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

here is increasing interest in modeling style choices in dialog, for example for enabling dialog systems to adapt to their users. It is commonly assumed that each user has his or her own stable characteristics, but for interaction style the truth of this assumption has not been well examined. I investigated using a vector-space model of interaction styles, derived from the Switchboard corpus of telephone conversations and a broad set of prosodic-behavior features. While most individuals exhibited interaction style tendencies, these were generally far from stable, with a predictive model based on individual tendencies outperforming a speaker-independent model by only 3.6%. The tendencies were somewhat stronger for some speakers, including generally males, and for some dimensions of variation.

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Prosody: Models, Methods, and Applications
Nigel Ward | Gina-Anne Levow
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Tutorial Abstracts

Prosody is essential in human interaction, enabling people to show interest, establish rapport, efficiently convey nuances of attitude or intent, and so on. Some applications that exploit prosodic knowledge have recently shown superhuman performance, and in many respects our ability to effectively model prosody is rapidly advancing. This tutorial will overview the computational modeling of prosody, including recent advances and diverse actual and potential applications.

2013

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Patterns of Importance Variation in Spoken Dialog
Nigel Ward | Karen Richart-Ruiz
Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2013 Conference

2012

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A Bottom-Up Exploration of the Dimensions of Dialog State in Spoken Interaction
Nigel G. Ward | Alejandro Vega
Proceedings of the 13th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

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Directions for Research on Spoken Dialog Systems, Broadly Defined
Nigel G. Ward
NAACL-HLT Workshop on Future directions and needs in the Spoken Dialog Community: Tools and Data (SDCTD 2012)

2008

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A Framework for Model-based Evaluation of Spoken Dialog Systems
Sebastian Möller | Nigel Ward
Proceedings of the 9th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue

2002

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Machine translation in the mobile and wearable age
Nigel Ward
Workshop on machine translation roadmap

2000

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Issues in the Transcription of English Conversational Grunts
Nigel Ward
1st SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue

1998

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Some Exotic Discourse Markers of Spoken Dialog
Nigel Ward
Discourse Relations and Discourse Markers

1995

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Book Reviews: Speech-to-speech translation: A massively parallel memory-based approach
Nigel Ward
Computational Linguistics, Volume 21, Number 4, December 1995

1992

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An Alternative to Deep Case for Representing Relational Information
Nigel Ward
COLING 1992 Volume 4: The 14th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

1990

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A Connectionist Treatment of Grammar for Generation: Relying on Emergents
Nigel Ward
Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Natural Language Generation

1988

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Issues in Word Choice
Nigel Ward
Coling Budapest 1988 Volume 2: International Conference on Computational Linguistics