The design of methods for performance evaluation is a major open research issue in the area of spoken language dialogue systems. This paper presents the PARADISE methodology for developing predictive models of spoken dialogue performance, and shows how to evaluate the predictive power and generalizability of such models. To illustrate the methodology, we develop a number of models for predictin...

Wikipedia has been a resounding success story as a collaborative system with a low cost of online participation. However, it is an open question whether the success of Wikipedia results from a “wisdom of crowds” type of effect in which a large number of people each make a small number of edits, or whether it is driven by a core group of “elite” users who do the lion’s share of the work. In this...

In this study, we investigate the problem of aggregating crowd opinions for decision making. The Wisdom of Crowds (WoC) theory explains how crowd opinions should be aggregated in order to improve the performance of decision making. Crowd independence and a weighting mechanism are two important factors to crowd wisdom. However, most existing crowd opinion aggregation methods fail to build a diff...

This paper presents PARADISE PARAdigm for DIalogue Sys tem Evaluation a general framework for evaluating and comparing the performance of spoken dialogue agents The framework decou ples task requirements from an agent s dialogue behaviors supports comparisons among dialogue strategies enables the calculation of per formance over subdialogues and whole dialogues speci es the relative contributio...

ferdowsi’s shāhnāma has a monotheistic context and its narrative deep structure has been demythologized throughout history at religious, ritual and mythic levels. however, an analytical approach can spot traces of the ancient beliefs reflected in the symbolic implications of the narratives as well as the language and imagery of the shāhnāma. the first line in the preface of the shāhnāma, “in th...

The economic dependency of the Eastern Caribbean on tourism has been welldocumented (Ferguson 1997, Lea 1998, Patullo 1996). A large element of its attractiveness depends on its connotations of paradise in the Minority World, and therefore it is an economic necessity that paradise is continually simulatable. The widespread development of all-inclusive resorts, or what Bauman has termed ‘reserva...

The generalized transitive closure operator can be used to ask and answer a number of sophisticated queries on a database which is viewed as a directed graph. These queries cannot be expressed in SQL or relational algebra and neither can they be answered by commercially available relational or object-oriented database systems. In this report we describe the design and implementation of the gene...

The use of collective intelligence applications in educational settings has been reported in the literature for almost two decades. These collective intelligence applications aggregate individual knowledge via different synchronous and asynchronous mode of communications and Web 2.0 applications which support learning, communication and collaboration activities, and create “Wisdom of the Crowds...