Zara the Supergirl is an interactive system that, while having a conversation with a user, uses its built in sentiment analysis, emotion recognition, facial and speech recognition modules, to exhibit the human-like response of sharing emotions. In addition, at the end of a 5-10 minute conversation with the user, it can give a comprehensive personality analysis based on the user’s interaction wi...

In this paper we present a novel featureenriched approach that learns to detect the conversation focus of threaded discussions by combining NLP analysis and IR techniques. Using the graph-based algorithm HITS, we integrate different features such as lexical similarity, poster trustworthiness, and speech act analysis of human conversations with featureoriented link generation functions. It is th...

Organization-bounded online communities compete as well as collaborate regarding valued member resources. Membership overlap creates competition amongst communities because their overlapping members must choose where to allocate their limited time. But members also collaborate across communities in inter-community discussion threads to tackle common problems together. This paper examines how me...

This paper uses a short 'Christmas fairy-story for oncologists' sent by Christopher Andrewes with a 1935 letter to Peyton Rous as the centrepiece of a reflection on the state of knowledge and speculation about the viral aetiology of cancer in the 1930s. Although explicitly not intended for public circulation at the time, the fairy-story merits publication for its significance in the history of ...

With large student enrollment, MOOC instructors face the unique challenge in deciding when to intervene in forum discussions with their limited bandwidth. We study this problem of instructor intervention. Using a large sample of forum data culled from 61 courses, we design a binary classifier to predict whether an instructor should intervene in a discussion thread or not. By incorporating novel...

A typical discussion thread in an online forum spans multiple pages involving participation from multiple users and thus, may contain multiple view-points and solutions. A user interested in the topic of discussion or having a problem similar to being discussed in the thread may not want to read all the previous posts but only a few selected posts that provide her a concise summary of the ongoi...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explain some phenomena observed in the acquisition of motor skills: the loss of conscious access to knowledge of the structure of a skill and the awareness that an error has been made prior to the receipt of knowledge of results. Although there are rich descriptive accounts of skill acquisition in the literature, there are no satisfactory explanatory mo...

Recent advance in digital storage technology has enabled us to archive a large volume of video data. Thanks to this trend, we have archived more than 1,800 hours of video data from a daily Japanese news show in the last ten years. When considering the effective use of such a large news video archive, we assumed that analysis of its chronological and semantic structure becomes important. We also...

a Michael M. Danchak, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, [email protected] b Kimberly Kenyon, State University of New York at Albany, [email protected] Abstract -Threaded discussion has the potential to be a very effective tool for learning online. However, it does not naturally fit well into engineering and science courses because of the factual nature of these domains. Our experience with thi...

Conversation is central to human interaction. The usual way to conduct asynchronous “conversations” over the Internet is to post e-mail messages on an electronic bulletin board, with messages organized by topic. However, such environments do not allow us to exploit the richness of conversation theory for effective collaboration. This presentation will review key elements of conversation theory ...