ILCB's monthly newsletter N°23

ILCB's monthly newsletter

N°23 - March- 15th, 2023

Bringing together experts in linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, medicine and computer science to understand and to model how language functions.

Dear members of the ILCB community,

Our last lunch talk given by Adeen Flinker (New York University) on the “Neural dynamics of feedforward and feedback speech processing” broke all records, with close to 100 participants on site plus those attending online. Thank you all for coming! Please remember to register at least 3 days before the events so we can order enough food and drinks for everyone...

We have two workshops coming up. A one-day workshop will be hosted by IMERA on March 24 on “Timing, action and language”. A two-days workshop will take place at Saint-Charles campus on April 3rd and 4th on “Multimodality in Social Interaction”.

We are also having our annual scientific retreat soon (once again at Porquerolles!), on April 11th, 12th and 13th. The number of places is limited, so it wasn’t possible to invite all of you; but there are a few places left for those who would like to come along. We will start with a scientific speed-dating on the first day, presentations by the docs and postdocs on the second day, along with two key note conferences, one by Martin Pickering and one by Fabienne Delfour who works on communication in dolphins. We will finish the retreat with progress meetings of our different project teams. Please contact Nadera Bureau asap if you are interested.

I look forward to seeing you at one of these events.

Best wishes

Johannes

Figure of the month

A multimodal approach for modeling engagement in conversation

The engagement of participants varies a lot during a conversation, with direct consequences on the quality and the success of the interaction. How is this engagement implemented? We propose a new model of engagement based on a multimodal description encompassing as many cues as possible from prosody, gestures, facial expressions, lexicon, and syntax. We used classical machine learning algorithms to build different variants based on original datasets of natural conversations (figure). Different classification experiments were conducted, ranging from binary to 5-classes. Our results constitute the state-of-the-art in this task, applied on human-human conversations. They allow disentangling the respective contribution of each modality to conversational engagement.

Arthur Pellet-Rostaing, Roxane Bertrand, Auriane Boudin, Stéphane Rauzy, and Philippe Blache. 2023.

A Multimodal Approach for Modeling Engagement in Conversation.

Frontiers in Computer Science 5: 1062342 -- @HAL

Featured publications

Tactile Perception of Auditory Roughness

Corentin Bernard, Richard Kronland-Martinet, Madeline Fery, Sølvi Ystad, and Etienne Thoret

The Effects of Semantic and Syntactic Prediction on Reading Aloud

Elisa Gavard and Johannes C. Ziegler

Ensemble Learning for the Detection of Pli-de-Passages in the Superior Temporal Sulcus

Tianqi Song, Clémentine Bodin, and Olivier Coulon

Ouvertures et salutations entre babouins : Organisation de la séquence et orientation incarnée vers l’autre

Lorenza Mondada and Adrien Meguerditchian

Multimodal Intervention in 8- to 13-Year-Old French Dyslexic Readers: Study Protocol for a Randomized Multicenter Controlled Crossover Trial

Karine Louna Harrar-Eskinazi, Bruno De Cara, Gilles Leloup, Julie Nothelier, Hervé Caci, Johannes C. Ziegler, and Sylvane Faure

Cerebral Activity in Female Baboons (Papio Anubis) During the Perception of Conspecific and Heterospecific Agonistic Vocalizations: A Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy Study

Coralie Debracque, Thibaud Gruber, Romain Lacoste, Adrien Meguerditchian, and Didier Grandjean

Workshop on Time, Action, and Language

Local researchers will discuss the interactions between at least 2 of these 3 topics: timing and action; time and language; action and language on

Friday, March 24th

@IMERA and on ZOOM.

Full program here

On invitation basis only.
For further details, please email Jenny Coull or Kate Watkins.

Workshop on Multimodality in Social Interaction

Registration is mandatory and free!

Conference on Multilingualism

This event is postponed to June 2024

ILCB supports the Conference on Multilingualism (COM) 2024 will be held next year, most likely in June at "Le Cube" on the campus of Aix-Marseille Université, in the beautiful city of Aix-en-Provence. Abstracts will be accepted from a wide range of topics involving the study of bilingualism or multilingualism, from education to neuroscience.

Details