A Formal Account of Disorders in Dialogues

• Event: Seminar
• Lecturer: Maxime Amblard
• Date: 17 November 2017
• Duration: 2 hours
• Venue: Gothenburg

This talk will present the project SLAM (Schizophrenia and Language - Analyse and Modelling). Since 2011, we build and analyse a corpus of interviews of patient with schizophrenia, in french. Schizophrenia is well-known among mental illnesses for the severity of the thought disorders it involves, and for their widespread and spectacular manifestations ranging from deviant social behavior to delusion, not to mention affective and sensory distortions. The goal of the SLAM project is twofold: (i) to discuss how the concepts of rationality and logicality may apply to conversational contexts in which one of the speakers is a patient with schizophrenia, and (ii) to use logical framework to model specific manifestations, namely disorders in conversational speech.

Our data are taken from transcriptions of real conversations between a psychologist and a patient with schizophrenia. Data collection and selection relied on theoretical hypotheses from psychiatry and psychopathology. Confronted with such a pathological conversation, any “ordinary” speaker intuitively feels that there are some incoherencies or discontinuities. We use a DRT (Kamp and Reyle 1993) like semantics in order to propose an interpretation model for such incongruities.

On our recent works, we focus on the extension of compositional semantics based on TTDL (de Groote 2006), a lambda-calculus with continuations. One of our research project is to develop TTDL for Dialogue, in the same perspective as TTR (Cooper and Ginzburg 2002, Cooper 2004, Cooper and Ranta 2008). (Another one is the french translation of the Fracas resource, but it is not directly rely to SLAM)

The talk will present the SLAM corpus and project, and then (briefly) sketch the on-going works.