Embodied Pedagogical Agents (EPA) are increasingly employed in educational applications, for a variety of users and purposes. However, studies have shown that visual appearance, communicative style, and pedagogical roles of agents impact their acceptance, trust, and user interaction [1, 2, 3, 4]. In this paper, we present a study where 86 primary school children (aged 7-11) chose an EPA to ‘acc...

This study examines effects of microblogging communications during emergency events based on the case of the summer 2011 riots in London. During five days in August 2011, parts of London and other major cities in England suffered from extensive public disorders, violence and even loss of human lives. We collected and analysed the tweets posted by the official accounts maintained by 28 London lo...

The notion of a genre system typically connotes sequences of interrelated communicative genres. This paper suggests that we can find other types of relationships among genres. Data from a field study in a large emergency room illustrates how doctors, nurses, and clerical staff routinely combine document genres not only in sequences, but also in accumulations achieved by proximity or through mov...

Research in the rehabilitative aspects of audiology has not been as extensive as audiological research focused on the development and use of various auditory tests for diagnostic purposes . The work described here, supported by the Veterans Administration, represents an effort to restore the balance by focusing on the communicative problems experienced by hearing-impaired veterans and others, a...

Proper name systems provide individuals with personal identifiers, and convey social and hereditary information. We identify a common information structure in the name grammars of the world’s languages, which makes this complex information processing task manageable, and evaluate the impact that the re-engineering of naming practices for legal and political purposes has had on the communicative...

Communication is an essential skill for cooperative tasks, yet neuroevolved agents struggle to develop communicative behaviour. In fact, it has been shown that communicating agents are sometimes outperformed by noncommunicating ones on tasks that ostensibly require communication. In our paper, we explore mechanisms which could aid agents in developing communication through evolution. Specifical...

In this paper we describe Lokutor, a virtual human. Lokutor is a partially autonomous agent, living a 3D virtual environment. The agent can be controlled via natural language directives of the user (spoken or typed in) and by direct manipulation using a gra cal user interface. Its control system consists of a behavior-based reactive layer, a deliberative control layer and an motivational subsys...

A learning environment for the training of communicative competence has to consider the complexity of human experience, since it requires a number of cues that are managed hic et nunc in the flow of communicative exchange. Therefore, communicative competence has been traditionally considered as a typical face-to-face learning topic. So far, few opportunities exist to learn by experience in an e...

Communicative competence is one of the most highly sought after skills of prospective graduates among employers. In spite of its importance, the notion of communicative competence has been deemed fuzzy in Communication and Engineering studies. This fuzziness has undoubtedly led to tensions among stakeholders like educators and professional engineers across disciplinary tenures in interpreting t...

Communicative pointing is a human specific gesture which allows sharing information about a visual item with another person. It sets up a three-way relationship between a subject who points, an addressee and an object. Yet psychophysical and neuroimaging studies have focused on non-communicative pointing, which implies a two-way relationship between a subject and an object without the involveme...