www.christinehowes.com

DivCon

Human interaction is deceptively simple to engage in, yet surprisingly challenging to account for theoretically. Existing theories of language and cognition cannot fully account for the complex dynamics of verbal and non-verbal behaviours in interaction, which is becoming even more apparent with our increasing use of computer-mediated communication, such as the currently ubiquitous Zoom calls.

With DivCon, my vision is to transform our basic understanding of human interaction by showing how successful dialogue is driven by incremental, local and dynamic processes of mismatch management.

In our everyday interactions, we continuously make predictions about what will happen next, based on how our own and others' behaviour a ects the world, to open up new possible courses of action. In dialogue, these predictions are about sounds, words, inferences and even non-speech actions such as gestures or eye gaze. If our expectations are not met, we have to ascertain if the mismatching input can be resolved, or integrated as a surprising but rewarding outcome (as in the case of humour).

DivCon will produce a suite of corpus and experimental data for exploring the timely issues of communication via di fferent forms of computer-mediated communication, including text-based chats, video calls and virtual reality meetings. To do this, the project will create a novel experimental platform for experiments in real time live multimodal interactions using avatars and virtual reality. The formal arm of the project will develop a precise theory of divergence and convergence in interaction which uni tes verbal and non-verbal dialogue phenomena including gesture, gaze, feedback and laughter, using core notions of prediction and underspecifi cation. This model will be implementable in conversational AI -- an important step in the path to genuinely adaptive conversational AI systems, which are still beyond the reach of researchers despite the promise of recent decades.

2025

  • Giannitzi, E., Maraev, V., Lagerstedt, E. & Howes, C (2025). Laughter in sight: How gaze and laughter affect perceptions of a social robot. In Human-Computer Interaction. HCII 2025. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15769. Cham : Springer. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]
  • Howes, C. (2025). (Mis)managing the illusion of communication. Invited talk for "Science and Improv". [More] [Bibtex]

2024

  • Amido, S., Maraev, V. & Howes, C (2024). "No, you listen!" A pilot experiment into escalation devices in confrontational conversation. In Proceedings of the 28th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue - Poster Abstract. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]
  • Breitholtz, E. & Howes, C. (2024). Children's strategies for developing resources in interaction.. [More] [Bibtex]
  • Breitholtz, E. & Howes, C (2024). Behaving according to protocol: How communicative projects are carried out differently in different settings. In Proceedings of the 28th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue - Full Papers. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]
  • Ek, A., Noble, B., Chatzikyriakidis, S., Cooper, R., Dobnik, S., Gregoromichelaki, E. et al (2024). I hea- umm think that's what they say: A Dataset of Inferences from Natural Language Dialogues. In Proceedings of the 28th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue - Full Papers. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]
  • Han Qiu, A., Vanzan, V., Soupiana, C. & Howes, C (2024). Disfluencies in conversation: a comparison of utterances with and without metaphors. In Proceedings of the 28th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue - Full Papers. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]
  • Howes, C., Breitholtz, E. & Maraev, V. (2024). Only joking: Exploiting mismatches in topoi.. [More] [Bibtex]
  • Howes, C., Lagerstedt, E., Pagmar, D., Breitholtz, E. & Prendergast, C (2024). “Ice cream is super yummy” How children and ChatGPT respond to why and how questions. In Proceedings of the 2024 CLASP conference on multimodality and interaction in language learning. [More] [Bibtex]
  • Howes, C. (2024). Managed mismatches: Exploiting interactive Reasoning mechanisms in dialogue.. [More] [Bibtex]
  • Howes, C (2024). Divergence and Convergence in dialogue: The dynamic management of mismatches. In SLING. [More] [Bibtex]
  • Lagerstedt, E. & Howes, C (2024). I robot, you Jane? Ethics in the age of social robots. In Unfolding Ethics in Research and Society: Beyond Ethical Principles and Guidelines; WASP-HS Workshop in conjunction with the conference AI for Humanity and Society. [More] [Bibtex]
  • Somashekarappa, V. & Howes, C (2024). Influence of Robot-Gaze Aversion on Human-Behavioral Dynamics and Perceptual Cognition. In Proceedings of the 28th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue - Poster Abstract. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]
  • Vanzan, V., Han Qiu, A., Ayub Khan, F., Soupiana, C. & Howes, C (2024). Emoji-Text Mismatches: Stirring the Pot of Online Conversations. In Proceedings of the 28th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue - Poster Abstract. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]

2023

  • Breitholtz, E., Howes, C. & Cooper, R. (2023). All the more reasons: Mismatches in topoi in dialogue. Journal of Pragmatics, 217, 172-184. [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]
  • Howes, C., Breitholtz, E. & Maraev, V (2023). Getting beyond a joke: Accommodation and mismatches in humour. In The Semantics of Hidden Meanings: Workshop at the fourteenth International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation (TbILLC 2023). [More] [Digital version] [Bibtex]