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Language Technology and 3rd Wave HCI: Towards Phatic Communication and Situated Interaction

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New Directions in Third Wave Human-Computer Interaction: Volume 1 - Technologies

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Abstract

In the field of language technology, researchers are starting to pay more attention to various interactional aspects of language – a development prompted by a confluence of factors, and one which applies equally to the processing of written and spoken language. Notably, the so-called ‘phatic’ aspects of linguistic communication are coming into focus in this work, where linguistic interaction is increasingly recognized as being fundamentally situated. This development resonates well with the concerns of third wave HCI, which involves a shift in focus from stating the requirements on HCI design primarily in terms of “context-free” information flow, to a view where it is recognized that HCI – just like interaction among humans – is indissolubly embedded in complex, shifting contexts. These – together with the different backgrounds and intentions of interaction participants – shape the interaction in ways which are not readily understandable in terms of rational information exchange, but which are nevertheless central aspects of the interaction, and which therefore must be taken into account in HCI design, including its linguistic aspects, forming the focus of this chapter.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The relationship between LT and linguistics is a complex one (Reiter 2007; Jones 2007; Wintner 2009), but since the subject matter of both is human language and linguistic behavior, and since they share a common heritage, including a nontrivial set of ontological and methodological assumptions, they nevertheless tend to come up against the same problems.

  2. 2.

    There is now also an emerging field of sign language technology, dealing with the problems of processing the various signed languages of the Deaf (the Ethnologue lists no less than 177 sign languages worldwide; Simons and Fennig 2017). This field is still very much in its infancy, and we will not be able to discuss it further here.

  3. 3.

    To confuse matters further, LT – especially the written-language kind – is often treated as belonging to the field of artificial intelligence (AI), and in fact the three cases of communication breakdown mentioned at the beginning of this chapter have generally been reported as failures of AI. There is no doubt that these involve specifically LT, and also no doubt that LT is a thriving scientific discipline in its own right, with numerous conferences and journals.

  4. 4.

    Addressed in Sect. 3.1.

  5. 5.

    Addressed in Sect. 3.2.

  6. 6.

    Some well-known examples are the continental Nordic (or Scandinavian) languages Danish, Norwegian and Swedish; Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian; Bulgarian and Macedonian; Hindi and Urdu; and others.

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Acknowledgements

The work on this chapter has been made possible by financial support from several sources: the Swedish Research Council through its funding of the Towards a Knowledge-based Culturomics Research Program and Swe-Clarin, the Swedish node of the European CLARIN ERIC research infrastructure, as well as the University of Gothenburg through its funding of the Språkbanken research infrastructure.

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  1. University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Lars Borin

  2. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

    Jens Edlund

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  1. Lars Borin
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Correspondence to Lars Borin .

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  1. School of Interactive Arts & Technology, Simon Fraser University, Surrey, British Columbia, Canada

    Michael Filimowicz

  2. School of Communications, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

    Veronika Tzankova

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Borin, L., Edlund, J. (2018). Language Technology and 3rd Wave HCI: Towards Phatic Communication and Situated Interaction. In: Filimowicz, M., Tzankova, V. (eds) New Directions in Third Wave Human-Computer Interaction: Volume 1 - Technologies. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73356-2_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73356-2_14

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