Center for Language, Interaction, and Culture

GailBot Weekend Hackathon
2024-04-12 - 2024-04-14
GailBot is a ‘first pass’ automated transcription system designed to support conversation analytic research. Human interaction research relies on detailed transcriptions of language use (a system developed by conversation analyst Gail Jefferson, after whom GailBot is named) that are very slow and expensive to produce. GailBot makes it possible to produce first-pass detailed transcripts of dialogue at scale.
The GailBot development team will be visiting UCLA April 12th – 14th to run a ‘hackathon’ (2-4 hours per day) with the goal of adapting GailBot to fit a range of CA research workflows. Participants will learn about its capabilities, use cases, and limitations, as well as how to install, configure, and use the program. Note: Currently GailBot is only available on Mac, but the development team is working on a Linux package.
Program details coming soon, but if you have questions about coming for part of the hackathon or whether your data is appropriate, register and put your question in the form. We’ll respond.
GailBot Team:
Saul Albert — Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences, University of Loughborough
Muhammad Umair — Department of Computer Science, Tufts
Vivian Li — Department of Computer Science, Tufts
Julia Mertens — Senior Scientist at Boston Fusion Corp.
J.P. De Ruiter — Department of Computer Science and Department of Psychology, Tufts
Learn more about GailBot here.
Please sign up for this event using this form.
Download ad: GailBot Advert

J.P. De Ruiter (Tufts University)
2024-04-10 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
Please RSVP here by Friday, April 5th.

Terra Edwards (The University of Chicago)
2024-03-06 17:00 - 18:30

David Gibson (University of Notre Dame)
2024-02-21 17:00 - 18:30

CLIC Workshop: Adopting affective stances in interaction
2024-02-01 - 2024-02-02
Adopting Affective Stances in Interaction
February 1-2, 2024
In this workshop, we will collectively examine many of the resources that speakers rely on to display emotional stances (positive or negative) towards the actions speakers are performing or the ways in which those actions are being done. Sometimes affective stances are conveyed through smiles, eyebrow furrowing, sighs, or laughter. Other times, affective stances are conveyed through lexical choices (e.g., adjective choices such as “stupid” or “fabulous”) or even grammatical resources. We will be interested in approaching the questions of how and when affective stances are displayed in conversation as well as what effect this has on interlocutors and on the conversation (e.g., leading to halts in conversation progressivity or expansion of a telling). We hope to consider the roles of various aspects of speakers’ identities as well as sequential context. Moreover, our goal is to bring the perspectives of linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, linguistics, psychology, communication, and brain injury studies to bear on this investigation.
Registration is now open! You can register for this event here.
PLEASE NOTE: This is an in-person only event. Program and event details will be emailed to registered participants approximately a week before the event. For more information, contact the CLIC coordinator at clic@ucla.edu

Leslie Pagel (Authenticx)
2024-01-17 17:00 - 18:30

Michiko Kaneyasu (University of California, Los Angeles)
2023-11-29 17:00 - 18:30

Gus Cooney (The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania)
2023-10-18 17:00 - 18:30
Title: A New Social Psychology of Conversation
Abstract: Scholars from a variety of fields are increasingly interested in the study of conversation. However, advancing the science of conversation requires more than novel empirical findings. We also need curated datasets, new theoretical frameworks, and methodological refinements—an essential “infrastructure” that is currently lacking. In this talk, I highlight several of my recent initiatives in building this infrastructure: developing one of the largest public datasets of naturalistic conversation, the CANDOR corpus; an extensive review paper synthesizing the wide-ranging interdisciplinary history of conversation research; and new methodological techniques for effectively segmenting transcripts into turns at scale. Such innovations are crucial for bridging the gap between the micro-level dynamics of turn-by-turn conversation and the macro-level psychological judgments and impressions that result from interaction. Ultimately, these developments in data, theory, and methodology represent critical steps in the journey towards establishing a new social psychology of conversation.
Kindly RSVP by October 6 using the link below
Registration: https://bit.ly/clic-cooney

CLIC Annual Reception
2023-10-06 17:00 - 19:30
Welcome back! The CLIC Annual Reception will take place on October the 6th, 2023. Register for this event here.

The 26th Annual Conference on Language, Interaction and Social Organization
2023-05-19 - 2023-05-20 | UC Santa Barbara

Lal Zimman (Department of Linguistics, UC Santa Barbara)
2023-05-17

CLIC Workshop on Managing Competing Demands in Interaction: Identity, Cognition, and Affiliation
2023-04-27 - 2023-04-28
Organized by Giovanni Rossi (Department of Sociology, UCLA) and Tanya Stivers (Department of Sociology, UCLA)
When we interact with others, we juggle many competing pressures. We must both comprehend and produce language in a normatively tight timeframe. We need to work to try to understand and be understood by others, both semantically and pragmatically. Our self-presentations are continually adjusted for the addressee, the activity context, and the actions in which we are engaged. And, we must manage all of these factors while also working to manage our degree of affiliation with our addressees. In this workshop, we bring together speakers from a range of disciplines and methods in order to collectively explore how we balance these competing demands in real time and to what end.
Registration is now open! You can sign up for this event by completing this form.

Alexandra Paxton (Psychological Sciences - U. Connecticut)
2023-04-12
Dynamical, situated, wild: Attempts to capture the glorious mess of social interaction
Alexandra Paxton, University of Connecticut
April 12, 5pm
Social interaction is a glorious mess of multimodal communication embedded within an equally multifaceted cultural, temporal, and interpersonal context. Most people effortlessly manage that mess to connect, work, and even fight with others every day, but it poses a host of problems for the scholars interested in studying it, especially for those in traditional empirical approaches. In this talk, I present a brief overview of some ways to quantify the interconnectedness of social interaction, including both naturally occurring and experimentally derived data. In doing so, I argue that taking a complex systems approach provides methodological, analytical, and theoretical advantages to understanding social phenomena as they truly are—messiness and all.
RSPV: http://bit.ly/clic-paxton

Steven R. Quartz (Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, Caltech)
2023-03-08

Natasha Shrikant (Department of Communication, University of Colorado - Boulder)
2023-01-11

Marisa Casillas, PhD (Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago)
2022-11-09

Waverly Duck, PhD (Department of Sociology, UC Santa Barbara)
2022-10-12

CLIC Annual Reception
2022-10-07

The Unexpected: A Dialogic Symposium in Honor of Alessandro Duranti
2022-05-19 - 2022-05-20
FAQ
Is the symposium open to the public?
Absolutely! Just register here.

When will the program be posted?
When you register, you’ll receive a tentative program.

Do I have to attend the entire event?
No, and on registration you can tell us what events you’ll be there for.

Will there be meals?
Yes, appetizers will be served on Thursday evening, and on Friday there will be breakfast and dinner. Lunch will be on your own but there are places to eat across from the venue.

Where will the event be?
We’ll give you directions once you register!

Do I have to register?
Yes, please. We want to be sure we have the right number of seats, spaced out best for everyone and the right amount of food so please register! If you can’t come, you can let us know and we’ll take you off the list.

CLIC workshop with Joanne Golann (Vanderbilt University)
2022-05-04 17:00
Click here to RSVP

CLIC Presents: Federico Rossano (University of California, San Diego)
2022-03-09 17:00

CLIC Presents: Rick Dale (University of California, Los Angeles)
2022-02-23 17:00

CLIC Presents: Hansun Zhang Waring (Teachers College, Columbia University)
2022-02-09 17:00

CLIC Presents: Ananda M. Marin (University of California, Los Angeles)
2021-12-01 17:00

CLIC Presents: Matthias R. Mehl (University of Arizona)
2021-10-27 17:00 | Haines 279, 375 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, 90095
RSVP: https://forms.gle/d8Xwtc64dFmoVYDq7
The Sounds of Social Life Project: Observing Language and Interactions IRL

Matthias R. Mehl
Professor of Psychology,
Director of the Naturalistic Observation of Social Interaction Laboratory
University of Arizona
https://psychology.arizona.edu/users/matthias-mehl

How much time do we spend talking? Or laughing? Or sighing? Or arguing with others? And what do these behaviors tell us about how we live our lives? These seemingly trivial questions are important because they illustrate how little is known about our everyday social interactions. Over the last 20 years, I have developed and validated the Electronically Activated Recorder or EAR, an ecological momentary assessment tool that can track people’s naturally occurring (acoustic) social lives. Technically, the EAR is a digital audio recorder that intermittently records snippets of ambient sounds while participants go about their normal lives. Conceptually, it is a naturalistic observation sampling method that produces an acoustic log of a person’s day as it unfolds. With the EAR, we can begin to study how subtle yet objective (in the sense of observable) aspects of people’s daily social interactions and language use are related to important psychological processes such as personality, well-being, and health. In this talk I will give an overview of the EAR method and the research we have done with it.

CLIC Presents: Shrikanth Narayanan (University of Southern California)
2021-10-13 17:00 | Haines 279, 375 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, 90095
RSVP: https://forms.gle/RmfF7ExGNeRDR1y27
Human-centered Multimodal Machine Intelligence
Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory
https://sail.usc.edu/people/shri.html

Converging developments across the machine intelligence ecosystem, from multimodal sensing and signal processing to machine learning and data sciences, offer exciting possibilities for helping us understand human communication, behavior and interaction across a variety of contexts, and for creating technologies to support and enrich human experiences. Multimodal engineering methods can help analyze human trait (e.g., age), state (e.g., emotion), and behavior dynamics (e.g., interaction synchrony) objectively, and at scale. Machine intelligence could also help detect and analyze deviation in patterns from what is deemed typical. These techniques in turn can assist, facilitate or enhance decision making by humans, and by autonomous systems.
This talk will highlight some of these possibilities and opportunities through examples drawn from two specific domains. The first relates to machine intelligence for behavioral and mental health. For example, in determining whether a child is on the Autism spectrum, a clinician would engage and observe a child in a series of interactive activities, targeting relevant cognitive, communicative and socio- emotional aspects, and codify specific patterns of interest e.g., typicality of vocal intonation, facial expressions, joint attention behavior. Machine intelligence driven processing of speech, language, visual and physiological data, and combining them with other forms of clinical data, enable novel and objective ways of supporting and scaling up these diagnostics. Likewise, multimodal systems can automate the analysis of a psychotherapy session, including computing treatment quality-assurance measures e.g., rating a therapist’s expressed empathy. These technology possibilities can go beyond the traditional realm of clinics, to directly to a person’s natural settings. For example, remote multimodal sensing of biobehavioral cues can enable new ways for screening and tracking behaviors (e.g., stress in workplace) and progress to treatment (e.g., for depression), and offer just in time support.
The second example is drawn from the world of media. Machine intelligence tools can help analyze media such as about who is interacting with whom, about what, how and where. This includes offering objective insights into media representations and portrayals, along relevant dimensions of diversity and inclusion such as gender, race, age, and ability.

Biography of the Speaker:
Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan is University Professor and Niki & C. L. Max Nikias Chair in Engineering at the University of Southern California, where he is Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Linguistics, Psychology, Neuroscience, Pediatrics, and Otolaryngology—Head & Neck Surgery, Director of the Ming Hsieh Institute and Research Director of the Information Sciences Institute. Prior to USC he was with AT&T Bell Labs and AT&T Research. His research focuses on human-centered information processing and communication technologies. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the Acoustical Society of America, IEEE, ISCA, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). He is a recipient of several honors including the 2015 Engineers Council’s Distinguished Educator Award, a Mellon award for mentoring excellence, the 2005 and 2009 Best Journal Paper awards from the IEEE Signal Processing Society and serving as its Distinguished Lecturer for 2010-11, a 2018 ISCA CSL Best Journal Paper award, and serving as an ISCA Distinguished Lecturer for 2015-16, Willard R. Zemlin Memorial Lecturer for ASHA in 2017, and the Ten Year Technical Impact Award in 2014 and the Sustained Accomplishment Award in 2020 from ACM ICMI. He has published over 900 papers and has been granted eighteen U.S. patents. His research and inventions have led to technology commercialization including through startups he co-founded: Behavioral Signals Technologies focused on the telecommunication services and AI based conversational assistance industry and Lyssn focused on mental health care delivery, treatment and quality assurance.

2021 CLIC Annual Reception
2021-10-08 17:00 - 20:00 | Fowler Museum Terrace, 308 Charles E Young Dr N, Los Angeles, CA, 90024, United States
RSVP: https://forms.gle/YjbSuiPG8ie1fCWG7

Summer Workshops in Language, Culture, and Interaction
2021-07-20 | **POSTPONED UNTIL 2021**, Los Angeles, CA, 90024, United States
***Due to COVID-19, this summer event has been delayed until July 2021. Please check back at a later time for details.***

Please click this link to read more information about the Workshops: https://clic.ss.ucla.edu/2020-summer-workshop-series/

CLIC Presents: Douglas Maynard and Jason Turowetz — "On Autistic Intelligence and Autism Diagnosis"
2021-04-28 17:00 - 18:30 | **Details to be posted soon

CLIC Presents Kaoru Hayano — Reporting for and about a child: Addressing a child in talk between nursery teachers and parents
2021-03-10 17:00 - 18:30 | **Details to be posted soon
