Efficient virtual machines for the Prolog programming language (and also for other dynamic highlevel languages) are usually large and intricate pieces of software implemented in a low-level language such as C that are extensively optimized over many years and are therefore difficult to change in many respects. Due to their inherent complexity it is hard to develop them further, to maintain them...

The success of VRML —the Virtual Reality Modeling Language— which has established as the standard for 3D data on the Internet, shows that virtual reality is no longer limited to research labs but will become a part of every-body's life. Although VRML has just made its first steps from a static scene description language to an interactive VR specification, the realization of distributed virtual ...

Arabic, which is the fifth world language with regard to the number of speakers, geographical spread, and socio-literary prestige (Weber, 1997), similar to all other languages whose orthographical system is not based on Latin symbols has been subject to various types of changes resulted from the language contact with English as the default language used in the computer mediated communication su...

writing has always been considered an important literacy skill for foreign/second language learners. the internet provides such unique applications for the writing skill as weblogs, wikis, and social networking websites. up to now researchers have put their focus on the learners’ performances in the traditional paper and pencil environment or wikis and blogs it is time to also consider learners...

In this paper, we describe our ongoing research project of Virtual Babel, a contextaware machine translation system for Second Life, one of the most popular virtual worlds. We augment the Second Life viewer to intercept the incoming/outgoing chat messages and reroute the message to a statistical machine translation server. The returned translations are appended to the original text message to h...

The success of VRML —the Virtual Reality Modeling Language— which has established as the standard for 3D data on the Internet, shows that virtual reality is no longer limited to research labs but will become a part of every-body's life. Although VRML has just made its first steps from a static scene description language to an interactive VR specification, the realization of distributed virtual ...

This paper describes the knowledge processing in the CODY Virtual Constructor, an operational system enabling the interactive assembly of complex aggregates in a virtual environment. Two forms of reasoners axe used: a geometric reasoner that infers spatial properties of scene objects and a conceptual reasoner that keeps track of the evolving aggregate’s assembly structure. The combination of th...

An important and often laborious task in foreign language acquisition is vocabulary learning. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that performing iconic gestures together with novel words has a beneficial effect on learning performance. Can these findings be transferred onto virtual agents applied in gesture-supported vocabulary training? We present a study investigating whether iconic gesture...

Co-operative and pre-emptive scheduling are usually considered to be complementary models of threading. In the case of virtual machines, we show that they can be unified using a single concept, the bounded execution of a thread of control, essentially providing a first-class representation of a computation as it is reduced. Furthermore this technique can be used to surface the thread scheduler ...

Randall Sadler’s Virtual Worlds for Language Learning: From Theory to Practice is the second of three volumes in the Telecollaboration in Education series published by Peter Lang. The aim of the series is to highlight the pedagogical processes and outcomes of engaging language learners who, while geographically distant from one another, seek to collaborate on various activities, tasks and proje...