Papers by Mark Pluymaekers
Pritchard, O'Hara, Milsom, Williams & Matei (eds.).The Three Cs of Higher Education: Competition, Collaboration and Complementarity, pp. 185 - 204. Budapest: CEU Press., 2019
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Journal of Services Marketing, 2019
Purpose – Service robots can offer benefits to consumers (e.g. convenience, flexibility, availabi... more Purpose – Service robots can offer benefits to consumers (e.g. convenience, flexibility, availability, efficiency) and service providers (e.g. cost savings), but a lack of trust hinders consumer adoption. To enhance trust, firms add human-like features to robots; yet, anthropomorphism theory is ambiguous about their appropriate implementation. This study therefore aims to investigate what is more effective for fostering trust: appearance features that are more human-like or social functioning features that are more human-like.
Design/methodology/approach – In an experimental field study, a humanoid service robot displayed gaze cues in the form of changing eye colour in one condition and static eye colour in the other. Thus, the robot was more human-like in its social functioning in one condition (displaying gaze cues, but not in the way that humans do) and more human-like in its appearance in the other (static eye colour, but no gaze cues). Self-reported data from 114 participants revealing their perceptions of trust, anthropomorphism, interaction comfort, enjoyment and intention to use were
analysed using partial least squares path modelling.
Findings – Interaction comfort moderates the effect of gaze cues on anthropomorphism, insofar as gaze cues increase anthropomorphism when
comfort is low and decrease it when comfort is high. Anthropomorphism drives trust, intention to use and enjoyment.
Research limitations/implications – To extend human–robot interaction literature, the findings provide novel theoretical understanding of anthropomorphism directed towards humanoid robots.
Practical implications – By investigating which features influence trust, this study gives managers insights into reasons for selecting or optimizing humanoid robots for service interactions.
Originality/value – This study examines the difference between appearance and social functioning features as drivers of anthropomorphism and trust, which can benefit research on self-service technology adoption.
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Journal of Specialised Translation, 2019
In recent decades, post-editing has received its fair share of attention in the industry as
well... more In recent decades, post-editing has received its fair share of attention in the industry as
well as in academic circles. What has attracted by far the most attention is the question
of quality: together, machine translation and post-editing defy long-standing and
commonplace notions of quality. In this paper, we try to observe quality from the
vantage point of end users, who are believed to have the final say on a text’s fitness for
purpose. We will report on an experiment in which end users were asked to pass
judgment on manipulated machine translations with different degrees of post-editing.
Our findings demonstrate that the additional effort associated with higher degrees of
post-editing does not necessarily lead to more positive judgments about text quality. The
evidence suggests that text quality is context-dependent and is, therefore, subject to a
somewhat opaque process of constant (re)negotiation.
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Tijdschrift voor Hoger Onderwijs, 2018
Hoger onderwijsinstellingen investeren vaak fors in studentenmobiliteit en andere
internationali... more Hoger onderwijsinstellingen investeren vaak fors in studentenmobiliteit en andere
internationaliseringsactiviteiten die de ontwikkeling van interculturele competenties bij studenten moeten bevorderen. De verwachte meerwaarde van zulke projecten wordt vooral uitgedrukt in termen van carrièreperspectief, waarin interculturele competenties een centrale component vormen. Wat in veel internationaliseringsprojecten echter niet gebeurt, is nagaan in welke mate deze projecten ook echt het gewenste effect opleveren op de houding en het gedrag van de studenten. Vooral internationaliseringservaringen in verre bestemmingen vergen een substantiële investering van student en instelling, terwijl niet helemaal duidelijk is of studenten hierdoor ook daadwerkelijk intercultureel competenter worden. Mede om het leerrendement van internationalisering beter in kaart te brengen, is binnen Zuyd Hogeschool de Global Mind Monitor ontwikkeld, een kwantitatief meetinstrument dat zowel de effecten van internationalisering in eigen land als over de grenzen
kan meten. In dit artikel gebruiken we recente data (2015-2016) van een eerste longitudinale pilot study bij 320 studenten met dit meetinstrument. Op basis van t-toetsen en meervoudige regressieanalyses onderzoeken we met name het belang van culturele afstand tot het gastland voor de ontwikkeling van interculturele competenties bij studenten. De analytische modellen bevestigen onze verwachting: hoe groter de culturele afstand tussen het thuisland en het gastland, hoe sterker het leereffect. Deze resultaten kunnen nuttige inzichten opleveren voor de verdere ontwikkeling
van in internationalisering, zowel over de grens als ‘at home’.
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Proceedings of SERVSIG 2018
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Proceedings of SERVSIG 2018
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Proceedings of SERVSIG 2018
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Proceedings of QUIS 2017
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Proceedings of QUIS 2017
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Research Journal of the Institute for Public Relations, 2017
McDonald’s Japan experienced a violent customer backlash when it abruptly removed its counter men... more McDonald’s Japan experienced a violent customer backlash when it abruptly removed its counter menus in 2012. This study examines CEO Eikoh Harada’s explanation for what seemed like a routine adjustment in operations and investigates the negative social media response that followed. We draw on both academic theory about disenfranchised customers and literature about corporate apologies. The article focuses on Twitter, examining the large number of ‘ugly’, or harshly negative, Twitter comments directed at the CEO. Our study concludes future research on crisis communications must better take the voices of ‘ugly customers’ into account. The study also points to a new social media communication reality in Japan for which McDonald’s and other corporations were entirely unprepared.
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Proceedings of EuroCHRIE 2016
This study was conducted at the request of a recently merged Dutch health care institution that w... more This study was conducted at the request of a recently merged Dutch health care institution that wanted to learn how they could use their intranet more effectively to disseminate their new corporate identity and the associated values, in particular the hospital's core value of hospitality. Interviews held with employees from different departments revealed that, although everybody knew the intranet, they did not think its contents reflected the corporate values in any way. In a subsequent experiment, we demonstrated that improving the text quality of the intranet news items led to a significant decrease in perceived level of difficulty and reading time. Moreover, adding explicit lexical references to the core value of hospitality improved the hospitality image of the organisation among the employees. This suggests that it is indeed possible to turn the intranet into a more effective communication platform that can serve as a 'vehicle' for corporate values such as hospitality.
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Proceedings of EuroCHRIE 2015
This study was conducted at the request of a Dutch airport hotel which aimed to gain insight into... more This study was conducted at the request of a Dutch airport hotel which aimed to gain insight into how frontline employees were implementing its empowerment policy and how this implementation could be made more effective. Observations in the hotel revealed that frontline employees paid relatively little attention to personalisation during service delivery and interactional justice during service recovery. However, in a survey among guests and potential future guests, it was found that these interactional aspects have a considerable impact on perceived equity and satisfaction. Therefore, hotel managers should not just empower their frontline employees to make decisions during service delivery and recovery, but also equip them with the communication skills necessary to express empathy during their interactions with guests.
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International Business Review, 2013
This study explores the effects of trust, commitment, relation-oriented competencies and entrepre... more This study explores the effects of trust, commitment, relation-oriented competencies and entrepreneurial competencies on export performance. Using survey data from 134 exporting organizations located in the south of the Netherlands, a conceptual model is tested in which trust and affective commitment act as energizing forces for the development of competencies that have a positive effect on export performance. The main difference between this approach and other models is that affective commitment is hypothesized to have an indirect effect on performance, rather than a direct effect. This prediction is borne out by the data, which indicates that the role of trust and affective commitment in relational models of export performance may need to be reconsidered.
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Proceedings of Translation and Meaning 2010
This study explores the effects of relation-oriented competencies (communicative competence and c... more This study explores the effects of relation-oriented competencies (communicative competence and cultural sensitivity), entrepreneurial competencies (entrepreneurial posture) and relationship quality characteristics (commitment and trust) on export performance. Using survey data from 134 firms located in the south of the Netherlands, a conceptual model was tested focussing on the relative impact of communicative competence vis à vis the other independent variables. The results clearly reveal that all independent variables have a positive impact on export performance. Although communicative competence seems to be the least important , communicative competence nevertheless is an important indicator for export performance. Export success is, among others, indeed dependent upon communicative competence.
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Laboratory Phonology, 2006
This study investigated the role of morphological structure in explaining pronunciation variation... more This study investigated the role of morphological structure in explaining pronunciation variation. The focus was on the Dutch derivational suffix -igheid (/@xhEit/), which occurs in two types of words. In the first type,-igheid is analyzed as a single suffix. In the second type, there is a morphological boundary between-ig and-heid. The main research question was whether this difference is reflected in the duration of the /xh/ cluster. Two hypotheses were distinguished: one based on prosodic structure, which predicts that the cluster is shorter in the first type than in the second type, and one based on the informativeness of the affix given the morphological paradigm, which makes the opposite prediction. All occurrences of-igheid in a corpus of read speech were acoustically analyzed using Automatic Speech Recognition technology. The duration of the /xh/ cluster was found to be shorter in words of the second type than in words of the first type, providing support for the hypothesis based on informativeness. This finding suggests that morphological effects on fine phonetic detail cannot always be explained by prosodic structure.
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Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2007
This study explores the effects of informational redundancy, as carried by a word's morphological... more This study explores the effects of informational redundancy, as carried by a word's morphological paradigmatic structure, on acoustic duration in read aloud speech. The hypothesis that the more predictable a linguistic unit is, the less salient its realization, was tested on the basis of the acoustic duration of interfixes in Dutch compounds in two datasets: One for the interfix-s-1155 tokens and one for the interfix-en-742 tokens. Both datasets show that the more probable the interfix is, given the compound and its constituents, the longer it is realized. These findings run counter to the predictions of information-theoretical approaches and can be resolved by the Paradigmatic Signal Enhancement Hypothesis. This hypothesis argues that whenever selection of an element from alternatives is probabilistic, the element's duration is predicted by the amount of paradigmatic support for the element: The most likely alternative in the paradigm of selection is realized longer.
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Proceedings of Interspeech 2006
This study investigates whether the acoustic durations of deriva-tional affixes in Dutch are affe... more This study investigates whether the acoustic durations of deriva-tional affixes in Dutch are affected by the frequency of the word they occur in. In a word naming experiment, subjects were presented with a large number of words containing one of the affixes ge-, ver-, ont, or-lijk. Their responses were recorded on DAT tapes, and the durations of the affixes were measured using Automatic Speech Recognition technology. To investigate whether frequency also affected durations when speech rate was high, the presentation rate of the stimuli was varied. The results show that a higher frequency of the word as a whole led to shorter acoustic realizations for all affixes. Furthermore, affixes became shorter as the presentation rate of the stimuli increased. There was no interaction between word frequency and presentation rate, suggesting that the frequency effect also applies in situations in which the speed of articulation is very high.
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Phonetica, 2005
This study investigates the relationship between word repetition, predictability from neighbourin... more This study investigates the relationship between word repetition, predictability from neighbouring words, and articulatory reduction in Dutch. For the seven most frequent words ending in the adjectival suffix-lijk, 40 occurrences were randomly selected from a large database of face-to-face conversations. Analysis of the selected tokens showed that the degree of articulatory reduction (as measured by duration and number of realized segments) was affected by repetition, predictability from the previous word and predictability from the following word. Interestingly, not all of these effects were significant across morphemes and target words. Repetition effects were limited to suffixes, while effects of predictability from the previous word were restricted to the stems of two of the seven target words. Predictability from the following word affected the stems of all target words equally, but not all suffixes. The implications of these findings for models of speech production are discussed.
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Filosofie, 2005
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Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2005
This study investigates the effects of lexical frequency on the durational reduction of morpholog... more This study investigates the effects of lexical frequency on the durational reduction of morphologically complex words in spoken Dutch. The hypothesis that high-frequency words are more reduced than low-frequency words was tested by comparing the durations of affixes occurring in different carrier words. Four Dutch affixes were investigated, each occurring in a large number of words with different frequencies. The materials came from a large database of face-to-face conversations. For each word containing a target affix, one token was randomly selected for acoustic analysis. Measurements were made of the duration of the affix as a whole and the durations of the individual segments in the affix. For three of the four affixes, a higher frequency of the carrier word led to shorter realizations of the affix as a whole, individual segments in the affix, or both. Other relevant factors were the sex and age of the speaker, segmental context, and speech rate. To accommodate for these findings, models of speech production should allow word frequency to affect the acoustic realizations of lower-level units, such as individual speech sounds occurring in affixes.
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Papers by Mark Pluymaekers
Design/methodology/approach – In an experimental field study, a humanoid service robot displayed gaze cues in the form of changing eye colour in one condition and static eye colour in the other. Thus, the robot was more human-like in its social functioning in one condition (displaying gaze cues, but not in the way that humans do) and more human-like in its appearance in the other (static eye colour, but no gaze cues). Self-reported data from 114 participants revealing their perceptions of trust, anthropomorphism, interaction comfort, enjoyment and intention to use were
analysed using partial least squares path modelling.
Findings – Interaction comfort moderates the effect of gaze cues on anthropomorphism, insofar as gaze cues increase anthropomorphism when
comfort is low and decrease it when comfort is high. Anthropomorphism drives trust, intention to use and enjoyment.
Research limitations/implications – To extend human–robot interaction literature, the findings provide novel theoretical understanding of anthropomorphism directed towards humanoid robots.
Practical implications – By investigating which features influence trust, this study gives managers insights into reasons for selecting or optimizing humanoid robots for service interactions.
Originality/value – This study examines the difference between appearance and social functioning features as drivers of anthropomorphism and trust, which can benefit research on self-service technology adoption.
well as in academic circles. What has attracted by far the most attention is the question
of quality: together, machine translation and post-editing defy long-standing and
commonplace notions of quality. In this paper, we try to observe quality from the
vantage point of end users, who are believed to have the final say on a text’s fitness for
purpose. We will report on an experiment in which end users were asked to pass
judgment on manipulated machine translations with different degrees of post-editing.
Our findings demonstrate that the additional effort associated with higher degrees of
post-editing does not necessarily lead to more positive judgments about text quality. The
evidence suggests that text quality is context-dependent and is, therefore, subject to a
somewhat opaque process of constant (re)negotiation.
internationaliseringsactiviteiten die de ontwikkeling van interculturele competenties bij studenten moeten bevorderen. De verwachte meerwaarde van zulke projecten wordt vooral uitgedrukt in termen van carrièreperspectief, waarin interculturele competenties een centrale component vormen. Wat in veel internationaliseringsprojecten echter niet gebeurt, is nagaan in welke mate deze projecten ook echt het gewenste effect opleveren op de houding en het gedrag van de studenten. Vooral internationaliseringservaringen in verre bestemmingen vergen een substantiële investering van student en instelling, terwijl niet helemaal duidelijk is of studenten hierdoor ook daadwerkelijk intercultureel competenter worden. Mede om het leerrendement van internationalisering beter in kaart te brengen, is binnen Zuyd Hogeschool de Global Mind Monitor ontwikkeld, een kwantitatief meetinstrument dat zowel de effecten van internationalisering in eigen land als over de grenzen
kan meten. In dit artikel gebruiken we recente data (2015-2016) van een eerste longitudinale pilot study bij 320 studenten met dit meetinstrument. Op basis van t-toetsen en meervoudige regressieanalyses onderzoeken we met name het belang van culturele afstand tot het gastland voor de ontwikkeling van interculturele competenties bij studenten. De analytische modellen bevestigen onze verwachting: hoe groter de culturele afstand tussen het thuisland en het gastland, hoe sterker het leereffect. Deze resultaten kunnen nuttige inzichten opleveren voor de verdere ontwikkeling
van in internationalisering, zowel over de grens als ‘at home’.
Design/methodology/approach – In an experimental field study, a humanoid service robot displayed gaze cues in the form of changing eye colour in one condition and static eye colour in the other. Thus, the robot was more human-like in its social functioning in one condition (displaying gaze cues, but not in the way that humans do) and more human-like in its appearance in the other (static eye colour, but no gaze cues). Self-reported data from 114 participants revealing their perceptions of trust, anthropomorphism, interaction comfort, enjoyment and intention to use were
analysed using partial least squares path modelling.
Findings – Interaction comfort moderates the effect of gaze cues on anthropomorphism, insofar as gaze cues increase anthropomorphism when
comfort is low and decrease it when comfort is high. Anthropomorphism drives trust, intention to use and enjoyment.
Research limitations/implications – To extend human–robot interaction literature, the findings provide novel theoretical understanding of anthropomorphism directed towards humanoid robots.
Practical implications – By investigating which features influence trust, this study gives managers insights into reasons for selecting or optimizing humanoid robots for service interactions.
Originality/value – This study examines the difference between appearance and social functioning features as drivers of anthropomorphism and trust, which can benefit research on self-service technology adoption.
well as in academic circles. What has attracted by far the most attention is the question
of quality: together, machine translation and post-editing defy long-standing and
commonplace notions of quality. In this paper, we try to observe quality from the
vantage point of end users, who are believed to have the final say on a text’s fitness for
purpose. We will report on an experiment in which end users were asked to pass
judgment on manipulated machine translations with different degrees of post-editing.
Our findings demonstrate that the additional effort associated with higher degrees of
post-editing does not necessarily lead to more positive judgments about text quality. The
evidence suggests that text quality is context-dependent and is, therefore, subject to a
somewhat opaque process of constant (re)negotiation.
internationaliseringsactiviteiten die de ontwikkeling van interculturele competenties bij studenten moeten bevorderen. De verwachte meerwaarde van zulke projecten wordt vooral uitgedrukt in termen van carrièreperspectief, waarin interculturele competenties een centrale component vormen. Wat in veel internationaliseringsprojecten echter niet gebeurt, is nagaan in welke mate deze projecten ook echt het gewenste effect opleveren op de houding en het gedrag van de studenten. Vooral internationaliseringservaringen in verre bestemmingen vergen een substantiële investering van student en instelling, terwijl niet helemaal duidelijk is of studenten hierdoor ook daadwerkelijk intercultureel competenter worden. Mede om het leerrendement van internationalisering beter in kaart te brengen, is binnen Zuyd Hogeschool de Global Mind Monitor ontwikkeld, een kwantitatief meetinstrument dat zowel de effecten van internationalisering in eigen land als over de grenzen
kan meten. In dit artikel gebruiken we recente data (2015-2016) van een eerste longitudinale pilot study bij 320 studenten met dit meetinstrument. Op basis van t-toetsen en meervoudige regressieanalyses onderzoeken we met name het belang van culturele afstand tot het gastland voor de ontwikkeling van interculturele competenties bij studenten. De analytische modellen bevestigen onze verwachting: hoe groter de culturele afstand tussen het thuisland en het gastland, hoe sterker het leereffect. Deze resultaten kunnen nuttige inzichten opleveren voor de verdere ontwikkeling
van in internationalisering, zowel over de grens als ‘at home’.