Tag Archives: Linguistics

Politeness Research in Conversation Design

“Will you have a cup of tea?” – “No, no, no…” – “Go on, you will” – “No really, I’m fine!” – “You will, just a half-cup” – “Oh okay, just a half cup”.

This is a typical conversation you might witness upon entering an Irish home when I was growing up. The three to four turn polite decline, the modification of the offer, the giving in of the half-cup tea drinker. But in some cultures, this up front refusal of the offer may be interpreted as rude or ungrateful.

When designing virtual agents, be they chatbots or voice bots, an awareness of cultural context and social norms around areas such as politeness may make all the difference in a natural, seamless and comfortable user experience. Existing research in fields such as sociolinguistics can inform these design choices. Of course, nuance applies and not all generalizations will hold in every situation, but valuable insights are available to us if we consult the research!

For example, research by Hass & Wächter (2014) found that Japanese and German cultures present two opposite poles of a continuum when it comes to directness/indirectness of speech. A German communicative style favored the former – being more task oriented. The Japanese style favored the latter – valuing group orientation. Research on politeness has also been carried out in the setting of healthcare. Backhaus (2009) presents a cross-cultural comparative study of elderly care home interaction in Japan with elderly care home interactions in a range of different cultural and linguistic contexts. It was found, for instance, that praise, if applied out of context and in too exaggerated a manner, can be interpreted as another expression of the unequal power relations between residents and staff that characterize everyday life in the institution.

Consulting the research on topics like power dynamics and culturally specific values surrounding politeness are a valuable tool in the conversation designers kit.

What unique politeness principles are present in your culture?

Resources:

Hass & Wächter (2014) Culture and the Question of Impoliteness in Computer-Mediated Communication: a research gap. DOI: 10.18247/1983-2664/educaonline.v8n1p1-12

Backhaus (2009) Politeness in institutional elderly care in Japan: A cross-cultural comparison Journal of Politeness Research 5 (2009). DOI: 10.1515/JPLR.2009.004

What are Intents and Slots in Alexa Skill Building?

Intents and slots are central to the Alexa skill building process, but what are they exactly?

𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬

Intents consist of names and a list of “utterances”. The latter are the various ways in which a user might ask Alexa a question.
For example,
Name: “RestaurantIntent” Utterances: “Where can I find a good restaurant” or “What’s a good place to eat”.
Machine learning processes will cater for many more ways in which customers might ask this based on the utterances you add.
Each intent is “handled” at the backend, using AWS lambda for instance, and provides appropriate responses for each intent.

𝐒𝐥𝐨𝐭𝐬

Words that express variable information such as names and locations can be allocated as slots.
Such words can be highlighted in the original utterance using curly braces {}
You can then create a new slot name such as StreetName
You then assign your slot name to a slot type such as dates or place names.
These types can be built-in or custom made.

Hope these snippets are helpful 🙂

What is SSML?

You’ve probably heard of HTML but possibly not SSML. Where HTML is used to describe the structure of a web page, SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language) is an XML based markup language used in speech synthesis applications. It controls aspects of synthesized speech such as pronunciation, emphasis, pitch and rate. The Alexa Skills Kit supports a subset of SSML tags to make your Alexa skill more personable and customizable. Cool features include things like adding emotions such as “excited” or the addition of audio files to your app. Note – If you’re using the Alexa Skills Kit SDK for Node.js or Java you don’t need to use the <speak> tags!


Have you used SSML before?

For more info on using SSML with your Alexa App check out this documentation: https://developer.amazon.com/en-US/docs/alexa/custom-skills/speech-synthesis-markup-language-ssml-reference.html

The “Why” of Language – Form, Function, and Beauty

Form and function are familiar categories of language that address things like syntactic structure and the purpose of such in communication. Certain forms, for instance, the practice of shortening the form of very common words such as “woman” -> “women” rather than “woman” -> “womans”, are thought to be economical in our use of language and allow our brains to process them more effectively. Form and function are connected and we use syntactic and semantic tools to express this connection. A word, phrase or sentence that is frequently used can be made more economical to aid in comprehension as we saw in the case of “women”. Another example is iconicity, that is, when the utterance reflects the logical structure of the thing being described in the real world. It can help us to understand sentences quickly so that the purpose of our communication is carried out more readily. Take “the big brown wooden box”. Which of those attributes is most inherently true of the box? It could be wooden but black, or wooden and brown but small. The order of the adjectives is reflecting the level to which each is inherently true of the box the closer they get it it. This arguably helps us process such a logical reflection of the real world more effectively. For example, a parent telling a child who has dumped their red legos into the laundry basket to, “pick out all of the small red plastic blocks!”, might have better luck than the one asking that they, “ pick out the small blocks red plastic.” 

But, if languages can only be categorised by their form to the end of usefulness, why not just have one? Why don’t we all decide on one, easily formed, easily processed language and get things done more effectively? Well, apart from the fact that there would probably be years of raging debate as to what exactly is the best form or the quickest to comprehend, I thinking we’re missing at least one other category – beauty.
I mean, take a house. It’s there for shelter against the elements, protection of ourselves and our belongings and a place to have friends over. Why not all just pick a basic form of a house that will do the job and paint it brown? Actually, why paint it all? It’s fulfilling its form and function.
But, we don’t do that. We decorate our houses, embellish them with ornaments and attractive lighting, hang portraits and paint walls. We are created, not just to find forms that help us to function, but to create. And to express our unique and individual identities. Sometimes those align more with some than others, but there is beauty in the difference. There is also beauty in the common threads that run through even the most distinct of tastes. The same is true of language, I believe. We hear of Babel as a curse, and so it was. But given time and different circumstances (i.e., a little less of the “let’s all take over the world”), maybe the people of Babel couldn’t have helped but come up with new clever words and code languages to have fun with friends. Think of Tolkien! Perhaps they would have developed different dialects based on their values, interests and cultures that would eventually evolve into distinct languages and families embellished with syntactic secrets that the rest of us get to discover and explore.
Speculation? Yes. But, we’re created to create. I can’t help myself.

How Grassfields Bantu Taught Me To Think (Differently).


The view from my hotel in Bamenda. I remember wondering if trees and landscapes like these shaped the perceptions and languages of indigenous speakers.

“What is truth?” Pilate infamously enquired. It’s a topic that’s been wrangled with, debated, scoffed at and sometimes embraced. I fall into the category of believing that there is objective truth; right and wrong, fact and fiction. But, I also think that in an effort to defend objective provable truth some of us can fall prey to the fallacy of equating relativism with perspective.


Do soccer teams lose matches? Yes. Do countries lose wars? Yes. It’s objectively true. It doesn’t depend on my feelings, my beliefs, my hopes. It happens. However, does one person’s experience of loss, victory, confusion have to match mine? Do we .each do |x| (another coding pun) just like the next person? Of course not. Can I view the experience as an individual or as part of an individual culture that differs from yours? Yes. Does that make the reality of these experiences any less true? No. Objectivity and perspective are not at odds in the same way that truth and relativism are.
Seeing something from a different angle or feeling something unique doesn’t make the reality less true. It just makes me different, in some ways, from you. And that’s ok, and actually, beautiful.
When I began to study the Ring languages of Grassfields Bantu, I realised that here was a group of people with whom I had so much in common, we ate together, shared laughs and empathised with each others struggles. Yet, the way that they speak about the world, the way they form words, categories and sentences was so different from what I was used to.
One example was the semantic feature of [Shape] in their languages. Objects I viewed as distinct, bounded, individuated things like apples, chairs and ants, they viewed as masses to be individuated, selected from the concept of chair-ness and given a boundary with some morphological tool of their language. Now, before you think this is due to some lack of education or primitive form of knowledge…may I remind  you of Plato’s forms (aspatial substances) and the “chair-ness” of a chair? Or, in simpler terms, what is hair? Is it a mass on your head, or does it consists of numerous, individuated hair-like strands? The speakers of Grassfields Bantu have developed a complex noun class system that allocates nouns to groups based on categories such as animacy, plurality and, some argue (myself included), shape/boundedness. These speakers have stopped me in my tracks and cause me to see the same world from another angle.
Grassfields Bantu taught me to stop and think. It taught me to observe the multi-faceted nature of a given diamond of objective truth. Maybe there’s more than just my perspective, or yours.

Categories Collide: Logic Meets Creativity

 One of the main themes of my doctoral thesis in linguistics is the notion that “to cognize is to categorize”. As humans, we have a tendency to identify, evaluate and categorize. And that’s a good thing. Categorizing the edge of a cliff as “Dangerous!” or putting our hand in the fire as “bad idea” is helpful and probably wise. If we meet a stranger and pick up in the cadences of a French accent, we might attempt a friendly, “Bonjour!”. However, our natural ability to categorize is sometimes skewed, and, in the absence of nuanced insights, downright harmful at times. What if Alex Honnold looked at the edge of a cliff and it only ever set off the “Danger!” category? Ok, some of you might think that’s actually not a bad idea. But, on the basis of experience, skill and opportunity, that cliff-edge also sets off his “Challenge!” and “Possibility!” categories, resulting in an incredible human feat that drops jaws in wonder and sets a few palms sweating (trust me, I’ve felt my husband’s).
 So, why do I mention all of this. Well, with an undergrad in psychology and an (almost) PhD in linguistics, I’ve been immersed in the humanities and social sciences to a large extent. And having recently stepped into the realm of programming, I had previously thought that this was a hard-wired world of electrical signals hidden behind screens and immersed in a mysterious cloud that was very much out of my reach. Basically, not my field. Categorization: “Off-limits!”. But, when I realized that coding had a big role to play in the world of linguistics, in natural language processing and machine learning, I was intrigued. And when I wrote my first line of code and saw the words, “Hello World”, pop up, I was hooked.
 Worlds collided, categories meshed together. In linguistic terms, coding versus the humanities suddenly seemed to be more prototypical than classical categories. Basically, the edges were fuzzy. I started to think of the possibilities. I was reminded that I loved logic; black and white, right and wrong, but I also loved beauty, romance, head in the cloud-ness (see, I can even make terrible programming puns now). I quickly saw that at my hands were logical tools that, when used wisely, could create things of great beauty, means by which people can be educated, cultures and languages  can be preserved, and scattered families can communicate.
Categories can be helpful, but sometimes it’s good to have them collapse in on each other and create a beautiful unplanned soup (another coding pun, I’m getting good at this). And as I work on getting this new set of skills under my belt, I’m excited to see where this collision of worlds will take me.