Conflict and Multimodal Communication

This book explores the use of technology to detect, predict and understand social cues, in order to analyze and prevent conflict. Traditional human sciences approaches are enriched with the latest developments in Social Signal Processing aimed at an automatic understanding of conflict and negotiation. Communication-both verbal and non-verbal, within the context of a conflict-is studied with the aim of promoting the use of intelligent machines that automatically measure and understand the escalation of conflict, and are able to manage it, in order to support the negotiation process. Particular attention is paid to the integration of human sciences findings with computational approaches, from the application of correct methodologies for the collection of valid data to the development of computational approaches inspired by research on verbal and multimodal communication.

Theoretical approaches to conflict.- The cognition of conflict: ontology, dynamics and ideology.- Group conflict as social contradiction.- On stages of Conflict Escalation.- Revenge and conflict: social and cognitive aspects.- Competition and cooperation in language evolution: a comparison between communication of apes and humans.- The Price of Being Social. The Role of Emotions in Feeding and Minimizing Conflicts.- Argumentation and conflict .- Arguments, conflicts and decisions.- Common ground or conceptual reframing? A Study of the Common Elements in Conflicting Positions in French Interactions.- Disaffiliation and Pragmatic Strategies of Emotive Communication in a Multiparty Online Conflict Talk.- Communication of aggression and aggressive communication.- Giving Voice to Silence: A Study of State Violence in Bolzaneto Prison during the Genoa G8 Summit.- The rhetoric of conflict inside and outside the stadium: The case study of an Italian Football Cheer Group.- Some Puzzles of Politeness and Impoliteness within a Formal Semantics of offensive Language.- Direct and indirect verbal and bodily insults, and other forms of aggressive communication.- Emotions and Multimodal Communication in Conflict.- Multimodal Analysis of Low Stakes Conflicts: A Proposal of a Dynamic Model .- Rhetorics of Truthfulness in the battle between social attributions and empathic emotions..- Social Behaviour in Police Interviews: Relating Data to Theories.- From personalization to parrhesia: A multimodal analysis of autobiographical recalls in Barack Obama's political speech.- Technologies for conflict detection and simulation.- Detecting Speech Interruptions for Automatic Conflict Detection.- Be At Odds? - Deep and Hierarchical Neural Networks for Classification and Regression of Conflict in Speech.- Conflict Cues in Call Centre Interactions.- Serious Games for Teaching Conflict Resolution: Modeling Conflict Dynamics.