Dual interaction spaces—that combine text chat with a shared graphical work area— have been developed in recent years as CSCL applications to support the synchronous construction and discussion of shared artifacts by distributed small groups of students. However, the simple juxtaposition of the two spaces raises numerous issues for users: How can objects in the shared workspace be referenced fr...

Detection of child exploitation in Internet chatting is an important issue for the protection of children from prospective online paedophiles. This paper investigates the effectiveness of text classifiers to identify Child Exploitation (CE) in chatting. As the chatting occurs among two or more users by typing texts, the text of chat-messages can be used as the data to be analysed by text classi...

Synchronous discussions in distributed computer-supported learning environments are usually conducted employing chat tools. Lack of coordination and coherence among the contributions is a typical problem with chat. In this paper, we propose to apply learning protocols to increase coordination, coherence, and as a consequence the efficiency of learning. Learning protocols are system controlled c...

Online text chat has great potential for allowing small groups of people in school or at work to build knowledge and understanding together. However, chat participants often post in parallel, making it difficult to follow the conversational flow and to identify who is talking to whom about what. The loosely ordered succession of turns contributes to “response-structure confusion.” Parallel post...

This article examines the communication of text-based synchronous online discussion (chat) participants during the process of information sharing. It addresses the communicational constraints imposed by the computer-mediated communication (CMC) channel on participants’ expression of interpersonal and affective stances, analyzes the mechanisms participants employed to overcome these constraints,...

Text produced by processing signals intended for human use is often noisy for automated computer processing. Digital text produced in informal settings such as online chat, SMS, emails, tweets, message boards, newsgroups, blogs, wikis and web pages contain considerable noise. Also processing techniques like Automatic Speech Recognition, Optical Character Recognition and Machine Translation intr...

This study takes a dynamic approach to investigating engagement, examining fluctuations in cognitive-affective variables at regular time intervals during online collaborative second language (L2) writing tasks. Using conference software and editing software, 16 university students who use English as an L2, completed two problem-solution L2 tasks communication modes: video-chat text-chat. After ...

The DARPA BOLT Program develops systems capable of allowing English speakers to retrieve and understand information from informal foreign language sources. Phase 2 of the program required large volumes of naturally occurring informal text (SMS) and chat messages from individual users in multiple languages to support evaluation of machine translation systems. We describe the design and implement...

Dual-interaction spaces—that combine text chat with a shared graphical work area—have been developed in recent years as CSCL applications to support the synchronous construction and discussion of shared artifacts by distributed small groups of students. However, the simple juxtaposition of the two spaces raises numerous issues for users: How can objects in the shared workspace be referenced fro...

Social cues in online focus groups surface in the ways group members manipulate language, to signal their attitudinal shifts in position toward the group’s topics and what both moderators and members may have said. Their primary mode is task-based: their “job” is to respond to topics introduced by the focus group moderator; they also engage in “sidebar chat” among themselves. Using stance-shift...