Steve Whittaker

Also published as: S. Whittaker


2017

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Linguistic Reflexes of Well-Being and Happiness in Echo
Jiaqi Wu | Marilyn Walker | Pranav Anand | Steve Whittaker
Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis

Different theories posit different sources for feelings of well-being and happiness. Appraisal theory grounds our emotional responses in our goals and desires and their fulfillment, or lack of fulfillment. Self-Determination theory posits that the basis for well-being rests on our assessments of our competence, autonomy and social connection. And surveys that measure happiness empirically note that people require their basic needs to be met for food and shelter, but beyond that tend to be happiest when socializing, eating or having sex. We analyze a corpus of private micro-blogs from a well-being application called Echo, where users label each written post about daily events with a happiness score between 1 and 9. Our goal is to ground the linguistic descriptions of events that users experience in theories of well-being and happiness, and then examine the extent to which different theoretical accounts can explain the variance in the happiness scores. We show that recurrent event types, such as obligation and incompetence, which affect people’s feelings of well-being are not captured in current lexical or semantic resources.

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Argument Strength is in the Eye of the Beholder: Audience Effects in Persuasion
Stephanie Lukin | Pranav Anand | Marilyn Walker | Steve Whittaker
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 1, Long Papers

Americans spend about a third of their time online, with many participating in online conversations on social and political issues. We hypothesize that social media arguments on such issues may be more engaging and persuasive than traditional media summaries, and that particular types of people may be more or less convinced by particular styles of argument, e.g. emotional arguments may resonate with some personalities while factual arguments resonate with others. We report a set of experiments testing at large scale how audience variables interact with argument style to affect the persuasiveness of an argument, an under-researched topic within natural language processing. We show that belief change is affected by personality factors, with conscientious, open and agreeable people being more convinced by emotional arguments.

2015

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And That’s A Fact: Distinguishing Factual and Emotional Argumentation in Online Dialogue
Shereen Oraby | Lena Reed | Ryan Compton | Ellen Riloff | Marilyn Walker | Steve Whittaker
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Argumentation Mining

2002

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MATCH: An Architecture for Multimodal Dialogue Systems
Michael Johnston | Srinivas Bangalore | Gunaranjan Vasireddy | Amanda Stent | Patrick Ehlen | Marilyn Walker | Steve Whittaker | Preetam Maloor
Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Fish or Fowl:A Wizard of Oz Evaluation of Dialogue Strategies in the Restaurant Domain
Steve Whittaker | Marilyn Walker | Johanna Moore
Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’02)

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Speech-Plans: Generating Evaluative Responses in Spoken Dialogue
M. A. Walker | S. Whittaker | A. Stent | P. Maloor | J. D. Moore | M. Johnston | G. Vasireddy
Proceedings of the International Natural Language Generation Conference

2001

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SCANMail: Audio Navigation in the Voicemail Domain
Michiel Bacchiani | Julia Hirschberg | Aaron Rosenberg | Steve Whittaker | Donald Hindle | Phil Isenhour | Mark Jones | Litza Stark | Gary Zamchick
Proceedings of the First International Conference on Human Language Technology Research

2000

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Evaluation Metrics for Generation
Srinivas Bangalore | Owen Rambow | Steve Whittaker
INLG’2000 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Natural Language Generation

1998

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I just played that a minute ago!:” Designing User Interfaces for Audio Navigation
Julia Hirschberg | John Choi | Christine Nakatani | Steve Whittaker
Content Visualization and Intermedia Representations (CVIR’98)

1990

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Mixed Initiative in Dialogue: An Investigation into Discourse Segmentation
Marilyn Walker | Steve Whittaker
28th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

1989

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User studies and the design of Natural Language Systems
Steve Whittaker | Phil Stenton
Fourth Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

1988

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Cues and control in Expert-Client Dialogues
Steve Whittaker | Phil Stenton
26th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics