Chat tools are nowadays an integral part of many collaborative e-learning environments. However, standard chat tools suffer from important coordination and coherence deficiencies. In this paper we propose an open source generic framework for building malleable structured chat applications. Users can strengthen or relax constraints when they want during a chat session. The paper shows some demon...

We present the Ubuntu Chat Corpus as a data source for multiparticipant chat analysis. This addresses the problem of the lack of a large, publicly suitable corpora for research in this medium. The advantages of using this corpus for research is its large number of chat messages, its multiple languages, its technical nature, and all of the original chat messages are in the public domain.

Scholars have argued that the Internet could bring about the realization of an electronic global village, with no race, gender, infirmities, or the social problems that often accompany these physical indicators of difference. In this study, we explored this issue by conducting content and discourse analyses of online conversations about race and ethnicity in teen chat rooms. A key focus of our ...

We present an empirical analysis of TOM-Skype censorship and surveillance. TOM-Skype is an Internet telephony and chat program that is a joint venture between TOM Online (a mobile Internet company in China) and Skype Limited. TOM-Skype contains both voice-overIP functionality and a chat client. The censorship and surveillance that we studied for this paper is specific to the chat client and is ...

In this paper, we present our investigation on using supervised machine learning methods to automatically classify online chat posts into speech act categories, which are semantic categories indicating speakers’ intentions. Supervised machine learning methods presuppose the existence of annotated training data based on which machine learning algorithms can be used to learn the parameters of som...

BACKGROUND The need for early treatment of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) necessitates early screening. Very few tools have been prospectively tested with infants of less than 12 months of age. The PREAUT grid is based on dyadic assessment through interaction and shared emotion and showed good metrics for predicting ASD in very-high-risk infants with West syndrome. METHODS We assessed the ab...

Recently, online video chat services are becoming increasingly popular. While experiencing tremendous growth, online video chat services have also become yet another spamming target. Unlike spam propagated via traditional medium like emails and social networks, we find that spam propagated via online video chat services is able to draw much larger attention from the users. We have conducted sev...

From the beginning chat was predominantly used for casual internet communication. In the meantime it has become a common and well-established form of communication also for serious purposes in educational as well as in business contexts. Among its advantages are its easy access, its low-tech affordances, high usability and fast and flexible communication processes. A variant of chat, SMS messag...

A key role in the human reasoning capability is given by intuition. The aim of the work is to design a framework for an human-like information supplier, which combines “intuition” with the traditional, more rigid, rules-based knowledge. It is presented a preliminary system that represents the first step toward the aforementioned framework. The system allows a user to interact with a community o...