After the Tower of Babel: Understanding and Designing
for Communication across Languages
|
Speaker (s):
Dr. Ge Gao
Postdoctoral Researcher
Department of Informatics
University of California, Irvine, USA
|
|
Date:
Time:
Venue:
|
|
January 18, 2018, Thursday
10:00am - 11:30am
Meeting Room 5.1, Level 5
School of Information Systems
Singapore Management University
80 Stamford Road
Singapore 178902
|
|
ABSTRACT
Multilingual teams in which people who speak different native languages come together to achieve a common goal play an important role in today’s workplace. Despite the promise of multilingual teams for integrating diverse resources on a global scale, this potential is often hindered by problems regarding the use of a common language (e.g., English) to communicate. Tools like machine translation (MT) and automated speech recognition (ASR) offer potential technical solutions to these problems, but to date, they do not allow for multilingual interaction that is as fluid and natural as native language interactions.
In this talk, I will present a series of studies addressing the intrapersonal and interpersonal processes that are essential to achieving successful communication across language boundaries. This research concerns three ways of understanding and supporting communication in multilingual teams: 1) MT-mediated communication tools that allow everyone to use his/her native language; 2) ASR supported conferencing tools that provide the transcripts of everyone’s speech in a common language; and 3) informal conversation strategies where people shift between different languages to satisfy their situational needs. I will conclude by describing what I am currently doing to build on these results.
About the Speaker
Ge Gao is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication from Cornell University, with a minor in Information Science. Prior to Cornell, she worked in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) group at Microsoft Research Asia and NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Japan. She conducts research that examines how linguistic and cultural differences influence computermediated communication and team collaboration at a global scale. Her research draws on both quantitative and qualitative methods, including lab experiments, surveys, ethnography, and social sensing to examine variables such as conversational grounding, attributions for miscommunication, and negotiation of language choice among collaborators. She also works with computer and information scientists to design and test new tools to facilitate multilingual and intercultural teamwork. Gao publishes regularly at HCI conferences such as the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). She is enthusiastic about promoting language and cultural diversity within the research community and has helped provide translation support at multiple international conferences since 2011.
