Polyphonic Inter-animation of Voices in Chats

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Polyphonic Inter-animation of Voices in Chats

• Stefan Trausan-Matu1,2, Traian Rebedea1, Gerry
  Stahl3
• 1Politehnica University of Bucharest,
• and
• 2Romanian Academy Research Institute for
  Artificial Intelligence,
• Bucharest, ROMANIA
• 3Math Forum and the I-School at Drexel
  University,
• Philadelphia, PA, USA

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CSCL needs (Stahl 2007)

• Analysis of how meaning is actually constructed
  in small-group interactions
• Investigating specific structures of
  meaning-making practices
• We need a theory for structures of collaborative
  meaning making.

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Bakhtin in CSCL

• Wertch Lotman - text is a thinking device
  (1981)
• Koshmann the voices of others become woven into
  what we say, write, and think (1999)
• Sfard rather than speaking about acquisition
  of knowledge, many people prefer to view
  learning as becoming a participant in a certain
  discourse (2000)
• Stahl to learn is to become a skilled member of
  communities of practice . and to become
  competent at using their . speech genres (2006)
• Wegerif - teaching thinking skills by
  inter-animation meaning-making requires the
  inter-animation of more than one perspective
  (2005)

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Bakhtins ideas

• Dialogism
• Any true understanding is dialogic in nature
  (Voloshinov-Bakhtin, 1973)
• Real life dialog should be the considered, not
  only written text (as Saussure recommended)
• Utterances (not sentences) should be the unit of
  analysis
• Polyphony
• Inter-animation of voices
• Carnival
• Speech genres

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Polyphony and counterpoint

• Concept derived from classical music
• These are different voices singing variously on
  a single theme. This is indeed 'multivoicedness,'
  exposing the diversity of life and the great
  complexity of human experience. 'Everything in
  life is counterpoint, that is, opposition,'
  (Bakhtin, 1984)
• Multiple voices each utterance contains
  multiple voices
• Voices inter-animate in an unmerged way
• a plurality of independent and unmerged voices
  and consciousnesses

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What is a voice?

• an individual?
• voice of a talking person at a given moment
• participant (person) in general
• participant at a given time
• utterance
• idea
• a group?
• a theme (with more than a participant person)
• a position (liberal or conservative)
• a topic
• a thread

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What is a voice?

• an utterance can exist only by being produced by
  a voice (Wertsch, 1991) and it contains an
  action of that person, e.g. voice may be present
  in a dialog even if it contributed with only one
  utterance
• Following the musical parallelism, a voice is not
  fixed to a person, e.g. a piano player
  improvising on multiple voices
• a voice is not only the physical emitting
  features of an individual person, it is more a
  distinct position in a group, it may be something
  said by somebody, that has an echo, an influence
  in the future texts, utterances, ideas etc
• More important is the idea that, in a dialog,
  there are multiple equal voices that inter-animate

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Perspective on voices

• Physical emitting features of individual persons
• Individual personality - distinct positions in a
  group
• Acts that has an echo, an influence in the future
  texts, utterances, ideas
• Approach consider utterances linked in threads,
  but emphasize that each utterance
• is produced by a voice
• has influence in the future emitted utterances

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Carnival

• carnival is the concept in which distinct
  individual voices are heard, flourish, and
  interact together. The carnival was Bakhtin's way
  of describing Dostoevsky's polyphonic style each
  individual character is strongly defined, and at
  the same time the reader witnesses the critical
  influence of each character upon the other. That
  is, the voices of others are heard by each
  individual, and each inescapably shapes the
  character of the other."

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Polyphony

• only the difference between difference and unity
  as an emphatic difference (and not as a return to
  unity) can act as the basis of a differential
  theory (which dialectic merely claims to be) is
  the methodical point of departure for the
  distinction between polyphony and non-polyphony.
  (Mahnkopf, 2002).

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Polyphony

• A merge of
• Melody longitudinal
• Harmony transversal, vertical (the structure
  of music with respect to the composition and
  progression of chords, WordNet Dissonance is
  not excluded, it is very important!)
• Unity vs. Difference
• Inter-animation of voices inter-animation
  patterns

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Example problem (solved only collaboratively)

• Three years ago, men made up two out of every
  three internet users in America. Today the ratio
  of male to female users is about 1 to 1. In that
  time the number of American females using the
  internet has grown by 30,000,000, while the
  number of males who use the internet has grown by
  100. By how much has the total internet-user
  population increased in America in the past three
  years? (A) 50,000,000 (B) 60,000,000 (C)
  80,000,000 (D) 100,000,000 (E) 200,000,000

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Polyphony and contrapuntus in chats

• Multiple voices
• Threads
• Inter-animation on different dimensions
• Longitudinal vs. transversal, vertical
• Unity vs. Difference

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Inter-animation patterns

• Longitudinal
• Adjacency pairs
• Repetitions
• Elaboration
• Convergence
• Cumulative talk
• Repair
• Transversal, differential
• Dissonance

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Difference in chats

• Multivoiceness
• A differential position to the others
• Contemplating others ideas
• Dissonance
• Critique

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Utterances are linked in threads
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Explicit vs. implicit links

• Explicit links
• ConcertChat
• Implicit links
• Linguistic markers
• Inter-animation patterns
• Adjacency pairs
• Repetitions
• Difference-making

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Why many times there is a difference between
implicit and explicit links

• You probably feel the need to do an explicit
  reference when the implicit one is not obvious
• You can make only one explicit reference in an
  utterance (why not multiple references?)

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Polyphonic support for inter-animation

• Encourage multiple threads (chat allows them, in
  contrast to f2f dialog)
• Explicit threading (Wessner)
• Diagrams
• Summarization knowing what came before in clear
  summaries would help people to respond and carry
  on the melody

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Next steps

• Elaborate the theory
• Develop the analysis tool