In this study, we investigate syntactic and prosodic features of the speaker's speech at points where turn-taking and backchannels occur, on the basis of our analysis of Japanese spontaneous dialogs. Specifically, we focus on features such as part of speech, duration, F0 contour pattern, relative height of the peak F0, energy trajectory pattern, and relative height of the peak energy at the final part of speech segments. We examine, first, the relationship between turn-taking/backchannels and each feature of speech segments independently, showing that the features examined in this study are all related to turn-taking or backchannels and that the way they correlate is fairly consistent with previous studies. Next, we explore the inter-relationship among the features with respect to turn-taking and backchannels. We show that in both turn-taking and backchannels, (1) some instances of syntactic features make extremely strong contributions, and (2) in general, syntax has a stronger contribution than any individual prosodic feature, although the whole prosody contributes as strongly as, or even more strongly than, syntax. We also discuss some implications of our results, comparing them with previous models that have mentioned roles of syntax and prosody in turn-taking and backchannels.

For the purposes of this paper, however, we will for the most part ignore intentions. But see the last section. 2 If one thinks that the beliefs and desires in such a motivating complex constitute the reason for the act, then the present conception is in agreement with Davidson's thesis that reasons are causes. If one thinks of the reason as the contents of the beliefs and desires in the motivating complex, then reasons are not causes. If one thinks that \reason" shares the ambiguity of \belief" and \desire," sometimes meaning cognition, sometimes the content

SUMMARYAlthough information technology is expanding in the university environment, there are still problems, such as the difficulty of performing registration accurately due to the extremely complex rules in a registration system. In order to make such determinations with a high degree of precision, databases with a variety of information and programs that precisely describe the rules are needed, resulting in an expensive system. As a solution to this problem the authors introduce a framework which allows for submitting registration requests even when there is an error in the registration. As a result, a screening mechanism that can efficiently narrow down and clarify the various problems present in the system can be created while at the same time academic affairs staff can check the content of the submitted registrations. As is the case with paper-based registration, staff can take a look at problematic registrations submitted by students, and then can give precise guidance to each person based on the student's individual information. In addition, the authors provide specific operational data such as the access count for when registration was allowed from outside the school, the number of submissions during the registration period, and the load averages for the server when access peaked while running the system for about 3200 students during 2002 and 2003.

This presentation reports an outline of marking up the Japanese Map Task Dialogue Corpus. The project was conducted by an independent group of researchers from the faculties of Chiba University and other institutions. This corpus contains 128 dialogues by 64 Japanese native speakers. The basic design of the dialogues and recordings conform to the original HCRC Map Task Corpus of the University of Edinburgh. Two speakers participated in the map task dialogues; an instruction giver who has a map with a route and an instruction follower who has a map without a route. The giver verbally instructs the follower to draw the route on his/her map. The corpus is marked up according to XML-based TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) P5 format, which is developed in an effort to provide interchangeable and shareable text data. The transcriptions of TEI format are viewed as ‘‘tags‘‘ that describe the start and end times of utterances, the duration of pauses, nonverbal events, and synchronization of overlapping utterances. This corpus will be available through NII-SRC (Speech Resources Consortium).