Query Generation and Buffer Mechanism: Towards a better conversational agent for legal case retrieval

In legal case retrieval, existing work has shown that human-mediated conversational search can improve users’ search experience. In practice, a suitable workflow can provide guidelines for constructing a machine-mediated agent replacing of human agents. Therefore, we conduct a comparison analysis and summarize two challenges when directly applying the conversational agent workflow in web search to legal case retrieval: (1) It is complex for agents to express their understanding of users’ information need. (2) Selecting a candidate case from the SERPs is more difficult for agents, especially at the early stage of the search process. To tackle these challenges, we propose a suitable conversational agent workflow in legal case retrieval, which contains two additional key modules compared with that in web search: Query Generation and Buffer Mechanism. A controlled user experiment with three control groups, using the whole workflow or removing one of these two modules, is conducted. The results demonstrate that the proposed workflow can actually support conversational agents working more efficiently, and help users save search effort, leading to higher search success and satisfaction for legal case retrieval. We further construct a large-scale dataset and provide guidance on the machine-mediated conversational search system for legal case retrieval.     

Rate-distortion optimized frame dropping and scheduling for multi-user conversational and streaming video

INTRODUCTION Video packets are transmitted over the Internet using a best-effort service. Therefore, a large number of simultaneous video streams or cross traffic arriving at a network node (e.g. a multimedia gateway) may sometimes exceed the node’s forwarding capacity, i.e., the incoming data rate may exceed the outgoing data rate at the node. In this paper, we consider a scenario where M streaming videos and N conversa- tional videos pass through a network node with lim- ited forwardi…     

违反会话合作原则所表达出的语用意义——从《呼啸山庄》看会话合作原则的违反

通常情况下,遵循合作原则有助于会话的顺利进行和信息的有效传递。但故意违反合作原则并不一定造成交流上的障碍。相反,这种故意违反合作原则的行为,往往会产生特殊的会话含义和语用意义。文章运用Grice会话含义理论和合作原则,以《呼啸山庄》为实例,分析了小说人物的对话中所包含的会话含义以及特殊的语用意义。     

用典中的蕴含之研究

本从语词、逻辑和语境比照三个方面分析了用典中的蕴含。涉及了两个层次的问题；一是用典时表述典故的方式；二是联结典故和欲说之现实的手段。我们初步分析了这些方式和手段是如何导致蕴含的产生的。     

Towards understanding and mitigating unintended biases in language model-driven conversational recommendation

Conversational Recommendation Systems (CRSs) have recently started to leverage pretrained language models (LM) such as BERT for their ability to semantically interpret a wide range of preference statement variations. However, pretrained LMs are prone to intrinsic biases in their training data, which may be exacerbated by biases embedded in domain-specific language data (e.g., user reviews) used to fine-tune LMs for CRSs. We study a simple LM-driven recommendation backbone (termed LMRec) of a CRS to investigate how unintended bias — i.e., bias due to language variations such as name references or indirect indicators of sexual orientation or location that should not affect recommendations — manifests in substantially shifted price and category distributions of restaurant recommendations. For example, offhand mention of names associated with the black community substantially lowers the price distribution of recommended restaurants, while offhand mentions of common male-associated names lead to an increase in recommended alcohol-serving establishments. While these results raise red flags regarding a range of previously undocumented unintended biases that can occur in LM-driven CRSs, there is fortunately a silver lining: we show that train side masking and test side neutralization of non-preferential entities nullifies the observed biases without significantly impacting recommendation performance.     

T.伯奇的"语境敏感"解悖方案

“语境敏感”方案引进“索引性”、“语境”这些重要概念，开辟了从语用学的角度研究语义悖论的道路。伯奇把真值谓词视为具有单一意义而非固定外延，即外延为其使用语境函项的索引词，并且从哲学说明和形式刻画两方面对“强化的说谎者”悖论的直观分析进行了解释。不过，伯奇的真正目的并不只是为了避免悖论，而是想抓住自然语言中语义赋值的可导性特征。     

模糊限制语的社会语用研究

从语用的角度。详细讨论了模糊限制语的分类和功能,揭示了它与会话含意、合作原则以及礼貌原则的关系。模糊限制语的使用随着说话人的职业、性别和社会地位的变化而变化。掌握模糊限制语的表现特点和使用规律,有助于提高语言运用能力和表现力。     

从语用含意与人际交往原则的角度赏析《红楼梦》片段

运用语用学中Grice的合作原则及Leech提出的礼貌原则理论对《红楼梦》的一些经典人物对话进行分析,结果表明礼貌原则对于语言交流的作用高于合作原则。     

从会话含义理论看电影对白的字幕翻译——以《大腕》为个案研究

电影对白的字幕翻译,若为佳译,则能促进跨文化交际的成功。冯小刚执导的贺岁片《大腕》中的对白翻译是佳译的典范,因此,将其作为个案,进行描述性研究具有一定的价值。本文以格莱斯会话含义理论为指导,分析了该片中八段对白的字幕翻译,从中发现了四种可行的翻译技巧,即直译、补译、套译和换译。经论证,灵活运用这些翻译技巧可以在很大程度上再现原对白中的“会话含义”。     

会话含义理论应用于大学英语听力教学的实验研究

采用实验教学法探讨将Grice会话含义理论应用于大学英语听力教学以提高学生的听力理解能力的有效性。通过对实验教学前后测收集的数据进行T检验和相关性分析,得出会话含义理论应用于听力教学课堂对学生的听力理解能力提高有效的结论,并结合研究结果对大学英语听力教学提出一些建议。