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1. Cross-Cultural Affective Evaluation of Kawaii Robots in Virtual Spaces

   Laohakangvalvit, Tipporn; Sripian, Peeraya; Sugaya, Midori; Ohkura, Michiko; Berque, Dave; Chiba, Hiroko (July 2023, Springer)

   Rauterberg, Matthias (Ed.)

   In modern society, robots have been increasingly involved in human lives in various scenarios. As a future society with human-robot interaction is approaching, it is important to consider how to develop robots that give positive impressions for a variety of users. Based on an Affective Engineering approach, affective values can strengthen the impact of the first impressions of products. Kawaiiness is one affective value that can be a key factor in developing robots with positive impressions. In this research, we carried out a collaborative project to design and develop kawaii robot prototypes in virtual spaces by American and Japanese university students. We then performed an experiment on affective evaluation of those robots using 10 adjectives: kawaii/cute, approachable, scary, trustworthy, cool, beautiful, polite, comfortable, and soft.We previously presented our statistical analysis results for the adjective “kawaii/cute.” However, the results of other adjectives, which potentially have effects on the robot impression, have not been presented yet. Therefore, in this paper, we present our further analysis of several adjectives to clarify their relationship with kawaii/cute and robot features across genders and cultures. In addition, we statistically analyzed the effects of robot pairs, adjectives, genders, and cultures. The results suggest that robots with features such as more animal-like, rounder, and shorter tend to increase positive impressions such as kawaii, approachability, beauty, comfortable, and softness. Also, we found no difference across gender and culture for the impressions on kawaii robots, which shows the possibility of expanding the concept of kawaii robots worldwide. 

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2. Discourse Comprehension: A Question Answering Framework to Represent Sentence Connections

   Ko, Wei-Jen; Dalton, Cutter; Simmons, Mark; Fisher, Eliza; Durrett, Greg; Li, Junyi Jessy (December 2022, Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

   While there has been substantial progress in text comprehension through simple factoid question answering, more holistic comprehension of a discourse still presents a major challenge (Dunietz et al., 2020). Someone critically reflecting on a text as they read it will pose curiosity-driven, often open-ended questions, which reflect deep understanding of the content and require complex reasoning to answer (Ko et al., 2020; Westera et al., 2020). A key challenge in building and evaluating models for this type of discourse comprehension is the lack of annotated data, especially since collecting answers to such questions requires high cognitive load for annotators. This paper presents a novel paradigm that enables scalable data collection targeting the comprehension of news documents, viewing these questions through the lens of discourse. The resulting corpus, DCQA (Discourse Comprehension by Question Answering), captures both discourse and semantic links between sentences in the form of free-form, open-ended questions. On an evaluation set that we annotated on questions from Ko et al. (2020), we show that DCQA provides valuable supervision for answering open-ended questions. We additionally design pre-training methods utilizing existing question-answering resources, and use synthetic data to accommodate unanswerable questions. 

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3. Moderate versus extreme interpretations of political slogans

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2024.12.005  

   Glass, Lelia (January 2025, Journal of Pragmatics)

   This paper surveys 451 Americans about how they view and interpret three semantically indeterminate progressive political slogans: #BelieveWomen, #DefundThePolice, and #FreePalestine. In each case, most people who agree with the slogan interpret it to express a moderate position, while most people who disagree take it to describe a more extreme position – which is indeed endorsed by a minority of those who agree with the slogan. These results show that online political discourse can foment both false controversy and false consensus. Because liberals tend to interpret these slogans moderately, while conservatives are more likely to interpret them as extreme, these results further suggest that people may choose their interpretation of a slogan to foreground the issues that they see as problems, and/or to justify their preexisting attitude towards the movement it champions. This paper brings together linguistics and political science to illuminate miscommunication in public discourse 

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4. “I understand that their minds may be elsewhere”: Towards a culturally responsive math pedagogy

   Donoghue, T. (October 2023, Psychology of Mathematics Education)

   Lamberg, T. (Ed.)

   This brief research report examines the discursive shifts of a secondary mathematics teacher participating in a collaborative learning community centered on culturally responsive mathematics teaching. We draw on two frameworks to analyze the teacher’s discursive moves. The first framework comes from Lefstein et al., (2020) on generative discourse practices in learning communities. The second framework — FAIR (Louie et al., 2021) — offers noticing practices for deficit versus anti-oppressive mathematics teaching. Through these lenses, we found that the teacher’s initial discourse practices were marked by deficit framing and noticing. The teacher’s discourse practices begin to shift towards a culturally responsive pedagogy in response to a particular artifact that captured student noticing and reframed the teacher’s problem of practice. 

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5. The role of discourse-level expectations in non-native speakers' referential choices

   Grüter, T.; Rohde, H.; Schafer, A. (May 2014, Proceedings of the annual Boston University Conference on Language Development)

   Expectation is a powerful mechanism in native-language processing. Less is known about its role in non-native language processing, especially for expectations at the discourse level. This study presents evidence from a story-continuation task, adapted from previous work with native speakers (Rohde et al., 2006), probing next-mention and coherence expectations among Japanese- and Korean-speaking learners of English. As in previous work, verbal aspect (perfective/imperfective) in a context sentence describing a transfer-of-possession event (e.g., Ron gave/was giving a towel to Patrick) modulated participants’ choices of next referents in their continuations. However, this effect was diminished in the non-native compared to the native-speaker group, despite comparable performance on an independent task assessing knowledge of verbal aspect in English, and previous evidence for significant effects of aspect on referential patterns in native Japanese and Korean processing (Ueno & Kehler, 2010; Kim et al., 2013). The two groups of speakers were equally sensitive to a cue that does not require predictive processing – the referential form of the story-continuation prompt – in that both groups were significantly more likely to establish reference to the discourse topic/Source of the transfer event for pronoun-initial continuations than for name-initial ones. Moreover, recency played a stronger role in non-native speakers’ referential choices than in those of native speakers. These results suggest that while native speakers engage in proactive discourse processing, non-native speakers are less able to do so, being sufficiently burdened by reactive processes required for information integration that they have only Reduced Ability to Generate Expectations (RAGE). 

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