Nigel Ward - Selected Publications


submitted	Patterns of Importance Variation in Spoken Dialog. Nigel G. Ward, Karen A. Richart-Ruiz. MediaEval, 2013, submitted The Similar Segments in Social Speech Task. Nigel G. Ward, Steven D. Werner, David G. Novick, Elizabeth E. Shriberg, Catharine Oertel, Louis-Philippe Morency, Tatsuya Kawahara. MediaEval 2013 Workshop, submitted.


2013	Using Dialog-Activity Similarity for Spoken Information Retrieval. Nigel G. Ward, Steven D. Werner. Interspeech, 2013.

2012

Prosodic and Temporal Features for Language Modeling for Dialog. Nigel G. Ward, Alejandro Vega, Timo Baumann. Speech Communication, 54, 161-174.
A Bottom-Up Exploration of the Dimensions of Dialog State in Spoken Interaction. Nigel G. Ward and Alejandro Vega, SigDial 2012. Nominated for Best Paper.
Towards Empirical Dialog-State Modeling and its Use in Language Modeling. Nigel G. Ward and Alejandro Vega, Interspeech 2012.
Visualizations Supporting the Discovery of Prosodic Contours Related to Turn-Taking. Nigel G. Ward, Joshua L. McCartney. Interdisciplinary Workshop on Feedback Behaviors in Dialog, 2012.
Possible Lexical Cues for Backchannel Responses. Nigel G. Ward. Interdisciplinary Workshop on Feedback Behaviors in Dialog, 2012.
Where in Dialog Space does Uh-huh Occur? Nigel G. Ward, David G. Novick, Alejandro Vega Interdisciplinary Workshop on Feedback Behaviors in Dialog, 2012.
Directions for Research on Spoken Dialog Systems, Broadly Defined. Nigel G. Ward. Workshop on Future Directions and Needs in the Spoken Dialog Community, at NAACL-HLT 2012.
Representing the Prosodic Context of Words using Gaussian Mixture Models. Shreyas A. Karkhedkar, Nigel G. Ward. Speech Prosody, 2012.
Thirty-Two Sample Audio Search Tasks. Nigel G. Ward, Steven D. Werner. UTEP Technical Report UTEP-CS-12-39.


2011	Achieving Rapport with Turn-by-Turn, User-Responsive Emotional Coloring. Jaime C. Acosta, Nigel G. Ward. Speech Communication, 53, 1137-1148. Temporal Distributional Analysis. Nigel G. Ward, Semdial 2011.

2010

The Challenge of Modeling Dialog Dynamics. Nigel G. Ward. Modeling Human Communication Dynamics Workshop at Neural Information Processing Systems 2010.
Dialog Prediction for a General Model of Turn-Taking. Nigel G. Ward, Olac Fuentes, Alejandro Vega. Interspeech 2010.
American and Arab Perceptions of an Arabic Turn-Taking Cue. Nigel G. Ward, Yaffa Al Bayyari. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 41, pp 270-275. 2010.
Lexico-Prosodic Anomalies in Dialog. Nigel G. Ward, Alejandro Vega, David G. Novick. Speech Prosody 2010
Visualization to Support the Discovery of Prosodic Contours Related to Turn-Taking. Nigel Ward, Joshua L. McCartney. Technical Report UTEP-CS-10-24.
Studies in the Use of Time Into Utterance as a Predictive Feature for Language Modeling. Alejandro Vega, Nigel G. Ward. Technical Report UTEP-CS-10-22.

2009

Towards the Use of Inferred Cognitive States in Language Modeling. Nigel G. Ward, Alejandro Vega. ASRU 2009.
Using Subtle Prosodic Variation to Acknowledge the User's Current State. Nigel G. Ward, Rafael Escalante-Ruiz. Interspeech 2009.
Estimating the Potential of Signal and Interlocutor-Track Information for Language Modeling. Nigel G. Ward, Benjamin H. Walker. Interspeech 2009.
Responding to User Emotional State by Adding Emotional Coloring to Utterances. Jaime C. Acosta, Nigel G. Ward. Interspeech 2009. See also the dissertation.
Looking for Entropy Rate Constancy in Spoken Dialog. Alejandro Vega, Nigel G. Ward. Technical Report UTEP-CS-09-19, 2009.

2008

Modeling the Effects on Time-into-Utterance on Word Probabilities. Nigel G. Ward, Alejandro Vega. Interspeech 2008, pp 1606-1609.
A Framework for Model-based Evaluation of Spoken Dialog Systems. Sebastian Möller, Nigel G. Ward. 9th Sigdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue, 2008. abstract and download
Factors Affecting Speaking-Rate Adaptation in Task-Oriented Dialogs. Nigel G. Ward and S. Kumar Mamidipally. Speech Prosody 2008.
Do Bystanders and Dialog Participants Differ in Preferences for Telecommunication Channels?. Nigel G. Ward, Anais G. Rivera and Alejandro Vega. 21st Human Factors in Telecommunication Symposium, 2008. pp 223-230.
Prosodic Features that Lead to Back-Channel Feedback in Northern Mexican Spanish. Anais G. Rivera and Nigel Ward. Proceedings of the Seventh Annual High Desert Linguistics Society Conference, pp 19-26. University of New Mexico, 2008.
Testing the Value of a Time-based Language Model for Speech Recognition . Nisha Kiran and Nigel G. Ward. Technical Report UTEP-CS-08-29. abstract and download

2007

Learning to Show You're Listening. Nigel G. Ward, Rafael Escalante, Yaffa Al Bayyari, and Thamar Solorio. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 20, pp 385 - 407, 2007.
A Combined Method for Discovering Short-Term Affect-Based Response Rules for Spoken Tutorial Dialog. Tasha K. Hollingsed and Nigel G. Ward. Workshop on Speech and Language Technology in Education (SLaTE) 2007.
The (Un)Predictability of Computer Science Graduate School Admissions. Nigel Ward. Communications of the ACM, 50, pp 104-106, March, 2007.
Searching for Explanatory Web Pages using Query Expansion. Manabu Tauchi and Nigel Ward. Computational Intelligence, 23, pp 3-14, 2007.
A Prosodic Feature that Invites Back-Channels in Egyptian Arabic. Nigel Ward and Yaffa Al Bayyari. Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XX, pp 187-206, Mustafa Mughazy (ed.), John Benjamins.
The Role of Gesture in Inviting Back-Channels in Arabic. Yaffa Al Bayyari and Nigel Ward, 10th Meeting of the International Pragmatics Association, 2007.

2006

Non-Lexical Conversational Sounds in American English. Nigel Ward. Pragmatics and Cognition, 14:1 (2006), 113-184.
Towards a Model of Computer Science Graduate Admissions Decisions. Nigel Ward. Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, 10, pp 372-383.
A Case Study in the Identification of Prosodic Cues to Turn-Taking: Back-Channeling in Arabic. Nigel G. Ward and Yaffa Al Bayyari. Interspeech 2006 (Special Session on the Prosody of Turn-Taking and Dialog Acts).
The UTEP Corpus of Iraqi Arabic. Nigel G. Ward, David G. Novick, Salamah I. Salamah. Technical Report UTEP-CS-06-02.
Prosodic Feature Generation for Back-channel Prediction. Thamar Solorio, Olac Fuentes, Nigel Ward, Yaffa Al Bayyari. Interspeech 2006.
Evaluating Real-Time Responsiveness in Dialog. Nigel G. Ward. in Dialogue on Dialogues: Workshop on the Multidisciplinary Evaluation of Advanced Speech-based Interactive Systems, at Interspeech 2006.
Detecting Filled Pauses in Tutorial Dialogs. Gaurav Garg and Nigel G. Ward Technical Report UTEP-CS-06-32.
Automatic Labeling of Back Channels. Udit Sajjanhar and Nigel G. Ward. Technical Report UTEP-CS-06-26.

2005

Root Causes of Lost Time and User Stress in a Simple Dialog System. Nigel Ward, Anais Rivera, Karen Ward, and David Novick. Interspeech 2005.
Some Usability Issues and Research Priorities in Spoken Dialog Applications. Nigel Ward, Anais Rivera, Karen Ward, and David Novick. Technical Report UTEP-CS-05-23.
Training Wheels for the Command Line. David Herrera and Nigel Ward. 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction.


2004	Automatic User-Adaptive Speaking Rate Selection. Nigel Ward and Satoshi Nakagawa. International Journal of Speech Technology, 7, pp 259-268. Pragmatic Functions of Prosodic Features in Non-Lexical Utterances. Nigel Ward. Speech Prosody 2004, pp 325-328.

2003

A Tool For Taking Class Notes. Nigel Ward and Hajime Tatsukawa. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 59, pp 959-981, 2003.
A Study in Responsiveness in Spoken Dialog. Nigel Ward and Wataru Tsukahara. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 59 (6), pp 959-981, 2003.
Nasalization in Japanese Back-Channels bears Meaning. Nigel Ward and Masafumi Okamoto. International Congress of the Phonetic Sciences, pp 635-638, 2003.
On the Expressive Competencies Needed for Responsive Systems. Nigel Ward. CHI 2003 Workshop on Subtle Expressivity of Characters and Robots, 2003.

2002

Machine Translation in the Mobile and Wearable Age. Nigel Ward. Machine Translation Roadmap Workshop at TMI-2002. pdf
Can Confidence Scores Help Users Post-Editing Speech Recognizer Output? Taku Endo, Nigel Ward, and Minoru Terada. International Conference on Spoken Language Processing 2002. pdf
Automatic User-Adaptive Speaking Rate Selection for Information Delivery. Nigel Ward and Satoshi Nakagawa. International Conference on Spoken Language Processing 2002. pdf
Shrdlu. Nigel Ward. in Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Nature Publishing Group, 2002. proof pdf

2001

Searching for Explanatory Web Pages using Query Expansion. Manabu Tauchi and Nigel Ward. PacLing 2001 (best paper award). pdf
A Wearable Cross-language Communication Aid. Jani Patokallio and Nigel Ward. International Symposium on Wearable Computers, 2001. abstract, early draft pdf
Responding to Subtle, Fleeting Changes in the User's Internal State. Wataru Tsukahara and Nigel Ward. CHI: Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems. ACM 2001. abstract, draft pdf
Design for a System able to use Time-Critical Spoken Advice. Shunsuke Soeda and Nigel Ward. Fifteenth National Conference of the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, 2001. abstract, paper pdf

2000

Prosodic Features which Cue Back-channel Responses in English and Japanese. Nigel Ward and Wataru Tsukahara. Journal of Pragmatics, 23, pp 1177--1207, 2000. abstract, pdf
Machine Translation. Nigel Ward and Daniel Jurafsky. Chapter 21 of Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition by Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, Prentice-Hall, 2000. draft (ps)
The Challenge of Non-lexical Speech Sounds. Nigel Ward. International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 2000. abstract, pdf
Evaluating Responsiveness in Spoken Dialog Systems. Wataru Tsukahara and Nigel Ward. International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, 2000. abstract
Issues in the Transcription of English Conversational Grunts. Nigel Ward. 1st SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue. ACL. 2000. abstract, pdf

1999

A Responsive Dialog System. Nigel Ward and Wataru Tsukahara. Machine Conversations, edited by Yorick Wilks. pp 169-174. Kluwer, 1999. abstract, draft
Requirements for a Socially Aware Free-standing Agent. Nigel Ward and Takeshi Kuroda. Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Humanoid Robotics, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, 1999. pdf
Low-Pitch Regions as Dialog Signals? Evidence from Dialog-Act and Lexical Correlates in Natural Conversation. Nigel Ward. European Speech Communication Association (ESCA) Tutorial and Research Workshop on Dialogue and Prosody. IPO, 1999. abstract and download

1998

Artificial Intelligence and Other Approaches to Speech Understanding: A case study in methodology. Nigel Ward. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 10, 487-493, 1998. abstract and download
Pacing Spoken Directions to Suit the Listener. Tatsuya Iwase and Nigel Ward. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP-98). pp 1203-1206. abstract, pdf
The Relationship between Sound and Meaning in Japanese Back-channel Grunts. Nigel Ward. 4th Meeting of the (Japanese) Association for Natural Language Processing. 1998. pdf


1997	Responsiveness in Dialog and Priorities for Language Research. Nigel Ward. Systems and Cybernetics, Special Issue on Embodied Artificial Intelligence, 28, pp521--533, 1997. abstract, full gzipped postscript Inferring Processing Times from a Corpus of Conversations. Nigel Ward. First Conference on Computational Psycholinguistics, poster presentation, 1997. handout pdf

1996

Using Prosodic Clues to Decide When to Produce Back-channel Utterances. Nigel Ward. 4th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP-96). abstract
Second Thoughts on an Artificial Intelligence Approach to Speech Understanding. Nigel Ward. in 14th Spoken Language and Discourse Workshop Notes, Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence, pp17-24, 1996. (SIG-SLUD-9601). abstract, paper pdf


1994	*A Connectionist Language Generator*. Nigel Ward. Ablex 1994.

1992

A Parallel Approach to Syntax for Generation. Nigel Ward. Artificial Intelligence 57, pages 183-225, 1992. abstract and download
Some Neglected Aspects of the Generation Task. Nigel Ward. Computational Intelligence 8(1), pages 161-171, 1992. abstract and download
An Alternative to Deep Case for Representing Relational Information. Nigel Ward. Proceedings 14th COLING, 1992, pp 1137-1141. abstract, pdf


1990	A Connectionist Treatment of Grammar for Generation: Relying on Emergents Nigel Ward. Fifth International Workshop on Natural Language Generation. pdf

Nontechnical editorials and postings on Artificial Intelligence research style and on Computer Science education are collected on my Commentary Page.

For other publications see my c.v. ; if you'd like copies of any of these, please drop me a note.

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