The graduate program "Task-Oriented
Communication" is organizing a workshop on "Processes of Communication"
to be held from February 9th to 11th, 2005 at the Center for
Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, Germany.
Investigating processes of communication
from
the perspective of interactional linguistics (approaches like e.g.
conversational analysis and functional pragmatics) means to focus on
the use of communicative resources in social, especially face-to-face,
situations. An analysis of those interactional settings takes into
consideration how the participants themselves jointly produce and
negotiate meaning in situ and how thereby interactive projects get done
step by step through the unfolding course of action.
A central concern is to understand how
participants make use of the diverse communicational resources
(language, prosody, gaze, gesture, body display) and material objects
at hand and how the holistic organisation of these resources can
analytically be conceived of as one gestalt.
The ability of processing language and
participating in communicational processes via speech distinguishes
humans from other species. These abilities necessarily involve an
extreme complex activation of the individual's receptive and productive
capacities and the underlying linguistic representations. Another focus
of the workshop will therefore lie on the cognitive and neural
processes that provide the general basis of communication.
Central investigation methods and
results are
presented, comprising fundamental as well as applied research areas.
Special emphasis will be given to functions and dysfunctions on the
cerebral level on the one hand and learning processes on the other hand.
Another focus of our workshop deals with
the
development of systems capable of natural multi-modal human-machine
interaction. One prerequisite for this is the adequate representation
of meanings and actions as well as the representation and analysis of
higher-level interaction structures (e.g. dialogue structures). To
achieve the goal of improving multi-modal interaction it is necessary
to analyse mutual reactions in human machine and human robot
communication. Therefore, it is advisable to develop learning
strategies to detect and interpret actions, gaze, gestures, and
emotions, as well as speech in order to derive meaning from perception.
Furthermore, considering the context of the communication situation is
a relevant task.
Following the interdisciplinary
orientation of
our graduate program, this workshop is to bring together researchers
from various disciplines and with different theoretical, empirical and
technical backgrounds to support an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas.
