http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2197

Picture this: that you receive two unexpected emails from me in quick succession. The first is a boilerplate pre-packaged message informing you that I have entered your address on my website as my temporary address for two or three days later this month, and I have let my employers know that people can call me or fax me at your house. I'm a complete stranger to you, except that you know my name from Language Log; I have obtained your email address from public sources, and pre-emptively set up arrangements to that assume I'll be staying with you.

The second of the two emails is personally addressed, and says that I'll be in your area later this month to give a lecture, and since I'm on a tight budget, would it be all right if I came to stay for two nights?

I take it you'd be somewhere between insulted and shocked, despite the fact that it is sort of flattering that a famous Language Log writer has singled you out as a person he would like to stay with. Well the equivalent not only happened to me today; it happens to me every couple of months.

Out of the blue comes an email telling me that my name has been added to a database of manuscript referees — academics who can be called upon to supply donated time reviewing papers submitted for publication. Then shortly after that comes a personal message from an editor (often a total stranger to me), asking me if I'd be so kind as to do a favor by reviewing a manuscript that has been submitted on some topic that I know about.

Every time my involuntary reaction is the same: repulsion, even anger, at the sheer rudeness of it. Despite the fact that a famous journal has singled me out as an expert they would like an opinion from.

Here's the latest example, with journal, location, and editor's name disguised to protect the not-particularly innocent. First, message number 1:

From onbehalfof+xxxxxx.wwwww.yyyy.zz@manuscriptcentral.com Sat Mar 20 07:26:27 2010
Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2010 03:26:20 -0400 (EDT)
From: xxxxxx@wwwww.yyyy.zz
Subject: Journal of Wwwww - Account Created in Manuscript Central

20-Mar-2010

Dear Professor Geoffrey Pullum:

Welcome to Journal of Wwwww - Manuscript Central site for online manuscript submission and review. Your name has been added to our reviewer database in the hopes that you will be willing and able to review manuscripts for the Journal which fall within your area of expertise.

The site URL and your USER ID for your account is as follows…

When you log in for the first time, you will be asked to complete your full postal address, telephone, and fax number. You will also be asked to select a number of keywords describing your particular area(s) of expertise…

And now for message number 2:

From onbehalfof+xxxxxx.wwwww.yyyy.zz@manuscriptcentral.com Sat Mar 20 07:27:26 2010
Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2010 03:27:19 -0400 (EDT)
From: xxxxxx@wwwww.yyyy.zz
Subject: Journal of Wwwww - Invitation to Review Manuscript ID JWWW-2010-0041

20-Mar-2010

Dear Geoff (if I may):

The above manuscript, entitled "On the snrdpql vbrh of frueqbd sjhdpbc" has been submitted to Journal of Wwwww.

We would be grateful if you would kindly agree to act as a reviewer for this paper. The abstract appears at the end of this letter… </font>

Notice that the first message was sent off 59 seconds before the second.

The culprit is not necessary the well-meaning editor Professor Xxxxxx, who I have heard of but not met, or any of the staff of the Journal of Wwwww, which I have seen but am not antecedently involved with. Quite probably it is a suite of standard editorial software, owned by the huge Thomson Reuters global publishing empire, once called Manuscript Central and apparently now renamed ScholarOne Manuscripts. It is "the proven industry leader" in editorial discourtesy, designed as

an innovative, web-based, submission and peer review workflow solution for scholarly publishers. Easy-to-configure, it allows for streamlined administrative, editing and reviewing capabilities.

ScholarOne serves more than 365 societies and publishers, over 3,400 books and journals, and 13 million registered users.

ScholarOne Manuscripts reduces time to decision, eliminates paper distribution costs, decreases administrative overhead and increases submissions.

So there are 13 million of us exploited reviewers! And in almost all cases, it seems, we were first informed that we had been press-ganged and entered into naval personnel records and issued with a sailor's uniform, and only then, a minute later, politely asked by the captain of the ship if we would be prepared to serve the navy as an ordinary seaman for zero pay. If hardly anyone else in academia has ever been offended by this, then I guess there must be way over 12.99 million people out there who are much more tolerant than I am.

All the software would have to do is to ensure that the default behavior is to send the polite request first, and send out the login name and password only later, after receiving a reply. That wouldn't seem presumptuous and annoying at all. I'm prepared to believe that it just might have been Professor Xxxxxx's fault: he could have had two tasks to execute and pressed the buttons in the wrong order. The reason I suspect the software design is that this has been done to me so often: the defaults must be such that this is the behavior resulting from the most natural way of using the program.

How could anyone design software with defaults so stupid? How could anyone (let alone a linguist) not notice this gross violation of polite discourse? You don't tell someone first that you have already been put in the database and given an account name and assigned some password that they didn't choose, and append a whole lot of terse instructions about what their duties will be in their new non-paying job, and then ask them to agree to do this favor!

So my policy now (since I really have too much to do, and some things have to go) is that I refuse refereeing requests when they arrive in this way. And from now on I will do it by sending the editor a link to this post. I'm sorry if this makes me seem unpleasantly grouchy, but I find these you-have-been-added messages unpleasantly rude. There may be 13 million people out there who tolerate this kind of discourtesy, but they aren't going to include me.

[If you would like to comment below, please do so. Notice that if you have never commented before, you have not already been entered into our database of commenters, and you will choose your own identifying name and supply your email address. (Don't forget that email address, because I may need to get in touch about coming to stay with you for a few days.)]

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2196

Many years ago, as a grad student attending an LSA summer institute, I took a course from Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff based on their work with Gail Jefferson, published as "A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking in conversation", Language 1974. That paper's abstract:

The organization of taking turns to talk is fundamental to conversation, as well as to other speech-exchange systems. A model for the turn-taking organization for conversation is proposed, and is examined for its compatibility with a list of grossly observable facts about conversation. The results of the examination suggest that, at least, a model for turn-taking in conversation will be characterized as locally-managed, party-administered, interactionally controlled, and sensitive to recipient design. Several general consequences of the model are explicated, and contrasts are sketched with turn-taking organizations for other speech-exchange systems.

At the recent IEEE ICASSP meeting in Dallas, one of the papers that caught my eye was Chi-Chun Lee and Shrikanth Narayanan, "Predicting interruptions in dyadic interactions", ICASSP 2010. Their paper starts like this:

During dyadic spontaneous human conversation, interruptions occur frequently and often correspond to breaks in the information flow between conversation partners. Accurately predicting such dialog events not only provides insights into the modeling of human interactions and conversational turntaking behaviors but can also be used as an essential module in the design of natural human-machine interface. Further, we can capture information such as the likely interruption conditions and interrupter’s signallings by incorporating both conversation agents in the prediction model (we define in this paper the interrupter as the person who takes over the speaking turn and the interruptee as the person who yields the turn). This modeling is predicated on the knowledge that conversation flow is the result of the interplay between interlocutor behaviors. The proposed prediction incorporates cues from both speakers to obtain improved prediction accuracy.

This work comes out of Shrikanth Narayanan's SAIL ("Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory") at USC, where a lot of interesting work is done. But before going on to tell you a little more about this work on interruption-prediction, I want to note the curious lack of communication between the disciplinary configurations represented by these two quoted passages.

Reading the two passages, an outsider might think that the researchers responsible for them were working on the same range of problems, and even in the same general disciplinary tradition, modulo the changes to be expected over a timespan of 35 years. But in fact, they come from two radically different traditions, which may or may not be mutually intelligible, but in any case are almost entirely without any direct communication.

Manny Schegloff is still an active researcher, in the sociology department at UCLA, roughly ten miles away from USC. I suppose that Schegloff and Narayanan must know of one another's existence. However, in documents on SAIL's website, Schegloff is never cited or mentioned. (This is not an indexing problem, since e.g. Liz Shriberg is cited 49 times, as well she should be. ) And the lack of communication is apparently mutual — Narayanan is apparently not mentioned in any of Schegloff's publications.

I wouldn't normally comment on this sort of thing, but I couldn't quite resist the irony of two researchers working on communicative interaction, at institutions less than ten miles apart, without any communicative interaction. Still, I should make it clear that this is not a matter of personal relationships, as far as I know, but rather the typical circumstance of disciplinary isolation. The world of speech and language research could be described as a sort of intellectual Balkans, except that the norm is not so much mutual hatred as mutual ignorance. There are at least half a dozen major cultures, and dozens more minor ones, all living and working more or less as if they were separated by impassable mountains and unfordable rivers.

OK, back to Lee and Narayanan's interesting work on interruption:

We used the IEMOCAP database for the present study. It was collected for the purpose of studying different modalities in expressive spoken dialog interaction. The database was recorded in five dyadic sessions, and each session consists of a different pair of male and female actors both acting out scripted plays and engaging in spontaneous dialogs in hypothetical real-life scenarios. In this paper, we are interested in the spontaneous portions of the database since they closely resemble real-life conversation. During each spontaneous dialog, 61 markers (two on the head, 53 on the face, and three on each hand) were attached to one of the interlocutors to record (x, y, z) positions of each marker.

Here's what the marker positions were like:

The basis of the study was a comparison of 130 interruptions and 252 "smooth transitions": In total, we annotated 1763 turn transitions in which 1558 were smooth transitions and 215 were interruptions. Since the distribution of these two types of turn transitions is highly unequal, we downsampled the data by including only three sessions (six subjects) of the IEMOCAP database with three dialogs chosen for each recording session. Subjects and dialogs were selected to include a majority of the annotated interruptions. In total, there are 382 turn transitions annotated with 130 interruptions and 252 smooth transitions used as our dataset in this paper.

Thus in classifying transitions as "interruption" or "smooth", the baseline performance is what you get by always guessing "smooth", namely 252/382 = 66%. Using the face and body-gesture features of the interrupte, and various acoustic features of the interruptee, both taken during a one-second period prior to the transition, Lee and Narayanan were able to do a bit better than this:

Logistic regression got them to 68%, and a "hidden conditional random field" model, with some special attention to feature selection, got them nearly to 71%. (The "Precision" and "Recall" values mean that in their best-performing model, 57% of the transitions predicted to be interruptions actually were interruptions, while 51% of the interruptions were predicted to be such. And they used a cross-validation approach, so that the numbers are not inflated by testing on the training set.)

The most striking fact about this result, it seems to me, is that interruptions turn out to be so hard to predict, at least in this particular collection of interactions. I wouldn't have predicted that.

They also tried predictions based only on one side or the other of the interaction. Here again, the results are a bit surprising:

In other words, when they try to predict interruptions solely from the interrupter's face and body kinematics, they do a bit worse than chance. Predicting solely on the basis of the interruptee's audio features, they do somewhat better.

[Note to self: someday post about the relationship of this work to Yuan, Liberman & Cieri, "Towards an integrated understanding of speech overlaps in conversation", ICPhS 2007.]

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2195

Kwala is no more. Kwala, the dog Mark taught to sing, the dog who ate exams, died this morning, aged fifteen. In addition to Mark's musical collaboration with her, Kwala has a claim to Language Log mention for another reason: in her young and vigorous days, she accompanied me to my Intro to Language class when the topic was animal language (or animal "language"). I ordered, ROLL OVER! And she rolled over. I ordered, BOWL SNOVER! And she rolled over. I ordered, SNIG BLIVVER! And she rolled over. Finally a clever student pointed out that the intonation was the same on all three utterances, and she could've been going by that (since she obviously wasn't responding to the actual words in the utterance). He may well have been right; or maybe it was just that she refused to learn any other tricks. She was smart: she was the only dog I've ever had, for instance, who would consistently backtrack around a pole when she was on the leash and we found ourselves on opposite sides of the pole; but she always considered it beneath her dignity to do tricks, no matter how many treats she got for doing them.

Now that she's gone, we'll probably have to retire Rich's Kwala Lexicon, which enshrined her independent (read: disobedient) spirit. But here it is:

KWALITY: any bad trait or characteristic.

KWALIFY: to bite another dog. As in: Rich: "I hope your walk in the park was an unkwalified success." — Sally: "Not really; she acted as if she wanted to kwalify just about every dog in the damned park."

DISKWALIFY: to remove the dog hair from. As in: "I had to diskwalify the guest-room bed again."

INEKWALITY: the condition of having to sleep on a dog bed. As in: "Kwala snapped at me when I insisted on her inekwality."

Who's up for a race?