• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.225-243
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• 2009

This study investigates the use of different speech act of apology strategies between male and female EFL college students by comparing the components of intensity, stylistic competence, and semantic formulas. The data was collected from 37 participants who were studying freshmen English reading course at the Department of English Education of C University in Seoul. Most students were English majors taking pre-teacher course of teaching English for secondary school students. The participants were divided into two gender groups of male and female. The discourse completion test (DCT) which was revised from the speech act of apology by Olshtain and Cohen (1990) was provided with the participants after the researcher explained the speech act of apology in ten situations. The speech act of apology depends on situation variables: social solidarity, severity of offense, and social status. The results show that in the preference of intensity, male and female have almost the similar ratio in high (female: 24.7%, male 24%) and low intensity (female: 75.3%, male: 76%). In the use of stylistic competence, male group (21%) expresses more diversely formal features than female group (12%), while female (87%) use more informal features than male (66%). Most of participants show a limitation in the use of speaking four types of semantic formulas: expression of apology (APOL), acknowledgment of responsibility (RESP), offer of repair (REPR), and promise of forbearance (FORB). As nonnative speakers, the participants cannot conduct the semantic formula in some situations regardless of the tasks provided. The results suggest that English teachers should recognize pragmatic variations in which students feel difficulty in appropriate speaking strategies on apology. This study also contributes to teaching learners the strategies and speaking patterns in the course of various apology situations.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.335-357
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• 2007

This study aims to investigate the pragmatic features of Korean EFL learners' interlanguage in the communicative act of complaining. Since a complaint, by its nature, is likely to cause offence, thereby threatening the social relationship between the speaker and the hearer, making a complaint in a polite manner is of crucial importance in maintaining harmonious social relationships. However, very little research has been carried out on the complaint speech act performances of Korean EFL learners. In particular, studies which attempt to examine the effect of social status on the choice of complaint speech act strategies are rare. The present study compared the complaint speech act performances of Korean EFL learners and those of native speakers of English with respect to social status. 24 Korean EFL learners and 28 native speakers of English participated and the data were collected via a Discourse Completion Test. The findings revealed that Korean EFL learners differed from native English speakers in the use of complaint strategies. These results indicate that Korean EFL learners lack certain important skills necessary to make complaints appropriately, suggesting the need for the foreign language learners to develop a more extensive pragmatic knowledge of complaint strategies.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.35 no.9
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• pp.554-561
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• 2008

Prediction technique of user's intention can be used as a post-processing method for reducing the search space of an automatic speech recognizer. Prediction technique of system's intention can be used as a pre-processing method for generating a flexible sentence. To satisfy these practical needs, we propose a statistical model to predict speakers' intentions that are generalized into pairs of a speech act and a concept sequence. Contrary to the previous model using simple n-gram statistic of speech acts, the proposed model represents a dialogue history of a current utterance to a feature set with various linguistic levels (i.e. n-grams of speech act and a concept sequence pairs, clue words, and state information of a domain frame). Then, the proposed model predicts the intention of the next utterance by using the feature set as inputs of CRFs (Conditional Random Fields). In the experiment in a schedule management domain, The proposed model showed the precision of 76.25% on prediction of user's speech act and the precision of 64.21% on prediction of user's concept sequence. The proposed model also showed the precision of 88.11% on prediction of system's speech act and the Precision of 87.19% on prediction of system's concept sequence. In addition, the proposed model showed 29.32% higher average precision than the previous model.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.77-97
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• 2007

To compare data on the speech act of requests from two different methods, a study was conducted in which both native and non-native speakers of English participated as subjects, and data were collected by means of actual e-mail writing and DCT (discourse completion test). The analysis of requests from the two different data-gathering methods showed that despite some similarities, considerable differences existed between e-mail and DCT requests in several important aspects of requests such as amount of talk, directness level, downgraders and supportive moves which play an important role in making a given request sound less imposing and more polite. Also it was shown that requests of non-native speakers differed considerably from requests of native speakers in terms of the four aspects of requests across type of data-gathering methods. Based on the findings, some suggestions were made for both further research and L2 classrooms.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.179-191
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• 2007

In a goal-oriented dialogue, spoken' intentions can be represented by domain actions that consist of pairs of a speech art and a concept sequence. The domain action prediction of user's utterance is useful to correct some errors that occur in a speech recognition process, and the domain action prediction of system's utterance is useful to generate flexible responses. In this paper, we propose a model to predict a domain action of the next utterance using a neural network. The proposed model predicts the next domain action by using a dialogue history vector and a current domain action as inputs of the neural network. In the experiment, the proposed model showed the precision of 80.02% in speech act prediction and the precision of 82.09% in concept sequence prediction.

• Journal of Arbitration Studies
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.71-97
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• 2021

The meaning of the amendment to the Media Arbitration Act in our society is not limited to media companies. And it's not just a problem for a specific group. It expresses public value because it is an issue that can affect members of society as a whole and furthermore, it becomes a bill that can infringe or strengthen individual freedom guaranteed by the Constitution, but makes different arguments. Freedom of speech is not achieved in a day and should not be easily lost by someone. Although it is not a frequent problem, fatal threats arising from wrong media reports take away an individual's present and future. It is because of this problem that the responsibility is important. Freedom of speech and control are heading in different directions, but they are the same as the front and back of the coin. The freedom pursued is different, but it consists of one body. If freedom and responsibility of speech made up of one body criticize or ignore each other, the results are scattered into a distorted On the other hand, the flexion of responsibility without freedom serves as a speaker that conveys the ideology of some classes or represents the interests of a particular group. The fact that the media should act as the air of society means that it should represent the interests of the majority, make them aware of the rights of unfair or marginalized members, and be their strength.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.259-270
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• 2013

A speaker's intentions can be represented by domain actions (domain-independent speech act and domain-dependent concept sequence pairs). Therefore, it is essential that domain actions be determined when implementing dialogue systems because a dialogue system should determine users' intentions from their utterances and should create counterpart intentions to the users' intentions. In this paper, a neural network model is proposed for classifying a user's domain actions and planning a system's domain actions. An integrated neural network model is proposed for simultaneously determining user and system domain actions using the same framework. The proposed model performed better than previous non-integrated models in an experiment using a goal-oriented dialogue corpus. This result shows that the proposed integration method contributes to improving domain action determination performance.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.27
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• pp.435-470
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• 2012

This paper aims to examine directives and its adjacency pair directives-responses in the Chinese textbook Hanyu Kouyu from the speech act theory, and give some suggestions for Chinese speaking instruction. For analysis of directives, it is important to consider context surrounding it at first. Context includes space for speaking, person who speak with, adjacent speech act, etc., so this paper considers context firstly before explaining directives and discusses how each element of context effects interpretation of its meaning. From the politeness perspective, directives and rejection as one of the responses are easy to be FTAs(face-threatening acts) fundamentally, so they are required to have some strategies for minimizing the threat, and it is found that there are strategies for positive face and negative face in the textbook. In the textbook, it is also examined that directives-responses contribute for interlocutor to accomplish social acts, for example, negotiating, insisting, maintaining, making alternative ideas, etc.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.261-270
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• 2024

This study is to analyze the aspects of speech acts of greetings in the workplace by Chinese students studying in South Korea. While existing studies have mainly focused on specific expressions of 'hardship' and 'greetings', or have been tailored to improve textbooks, this study aims to analyze the realization patterns of greeting actions in the workplace by Chinese students studying in Korea, based on speech act theory. It seeks to identify the differences and similarities between Chinese students in Korea and Koreans. The method of the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) in speech act theory is used for investigation, review, and analysis. Through the analysis results, this study hopes to understand the importance of greeting expressions among Chinese students in Korea and to help develop effective greeting strategies.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.351-368
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• 2005

The manual construction of the knowledge-base takes much time and effort, and it is hard to adjust intelligence systems to dynamic and flexible environment. Thus mental development in those systems has been investigated in recent years. Autonomous mental development is a new paradigm for developing autonomous machines, which are adaptive and flexible to the environment. Learning conversation, a kind of mental development, is an important aspect of conversational agents. In this paper, we propose a learning conversation method for conversational agents which uses several promising techniques; speech-act templates and genetic programming. Knowledge acquisition of conversational agents is implemented by finite state machines and templates, and dynamic sentence generation is implemented by genetic programming Several illustrations and usability tests how the usefulness of the proposed method.