Course From Text to Talk

Course description

The primary ecology of language is in social interaction, where people learn language and where they use it to coordinate joint action, build social relations, and exchange information. In contrast, when machines encounter language, it tends to be radically divorced from this habitat and reduced to decontextualised non-interactive text. This course features strands of both the language sciences and technological fields that share an interest in understanding how language is used in interaction. We review the empirical and theoretical foundations necessary for progress in fields like voice user interfaces and conversational AI. We discuss three challenges for work in this domain:

1. Representation, or howt o represent human interaction in ways that afford fine-grained and rigorous analysis that issensitive to position and composition;
2. Identification, or how to identify interactional practices and social actions in their sequential context; and
3. Evaluation, or how to assess interactive interfaces and conversational technologies using insights from the science of human interaction. The workshop features three lectures, two seminars on fundamental readings,and three interactive group work sessions for hands-on experience.

Aim

By the end of the course, students will

• Have arenewed appreciation of the complexity of talk-in-interaction
• Understand three key challengesfor novel and rigorous work on language andtechnology: representation, identification andevaluation
• Have hands-on experience withcurrent conversational technology
• Have acritical understanding of what conversationaltechnology can and cannot do

Target group/Participants

The course will be open to PhD-level (both early and late stage)

Language 

• Levinson, Stephen C. 2019. ‘Natural Forms ofPurposeful Interaction among Humans: WhatMakes Interaction Effective?’ In Interactive TaskLearning, edited by Kevin A. Gluck and John E.Laird, 111–26. The MIT Press.doi:10.7551/mitpress/11956.003.0012.
• Suchman, Lucy A. 2019. ‘Demystifying theIntelligent Machine’. In Cyborg Futures: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Artificial Intelligenceand Robotics, edited by Teresa Heffernan, 35–61. Social and Cultural Studies of Robots and AI.Cham: Springer International Publishing.doi:10.1007/978-3-030-21836-2_3

ECTS-credits

1

Lecturers

• Mark Dingemanse
• Alianda Lopez

Venue and dates

• 9 December 2024:Jens Chr. Skous Vej 7 , 8000 Aarhus C. Building 1465, room 120
• 10 December 2024:Jens Chr. Skous Vej 7 , 8000 Aarhus C. Building 1465, room 130

Course dates:

• 09 December 2024 09:00 - 16:00
• 10 December 2024 09:00 - 16:00