BBS(Bulletin Board Systems) is one of the most common places for threaded discussion. It becomes more and more popular among web users, especially in China. Everyday a huge amount of new discussions are generated on BBS. It is too difficult to find hot topics. To solve this issue, we propose a novel approach to detect hot topics on BBS for any period of time. Our solution consists of three step...

Gordon Pask’s conversation theory stands as a major contribution to cybernetics, education and epistemology. Ranulph Glanville was Pask’s student. He made himself familiar with conversation theory and promoted it in his lecture and writings throughout his career. In doing so, he made significant contributions. I summarise some of these here. To set the scene, I briefly outline some of the main ...

This paper discusses issues, possibilities and existing approaches for fitting an exception handling mechanism (EHM) in CSP-based process-oriented software architectures. After giving a survey on properties desired for a concurrent EHM, specific problems and a few principal ideas for including exception handling facilities in CSP-designs are discussed. As one of the CSP-based frameworks for con...

An experimental study of asynchronously communicating dyads tested the claim that conceptual representations could more effectively support collaborative knowledge construction in online learning than threaded discussions. Results showed that users of conceptual representations created more hypotheses earlier in the experimental sessions and elaborated on hypotheses more than users of threaded ...

This paper explain how to apply Constructivism and Conversation theories in Blended Learning environment in order to increase learning outcomes and quality. Some scenarios of Constructivism based blended learning activities are presented in this paper. In addition, a Constructivism Based Blended Learning model for “ICT Management” course, a compulsory course in Master of Management Information ...

In this paper I proposed the creation of a dialogue document for making available the knowledge contained within a creative conversation process. I discussed three main issues: the role of ordinary documents, the need to better represent conversation processes rationally, and the costs of editing conversation. I looked at the reasons why we rarely see the knowledge from the conversation process...

We propose a set of generic conversational strategies to handle possible system breakdowns in non-task-oriented dialog systems. We also design policies to select these strategies according to dialog context. We combine expert knowledge and the statistical findings derived from data in designing these policies. The policy learned via reinforcement learning outperforms the random selection policy...

Gordon Pask developed not only a Conversation Theory, but also a (less well-known) Interaction of Actors Theory, partly in response to demands during the time he worked in Amsterdam. The paper aims to clarify how this Theory intended to minimise the effcts of use on scientific results, while maximimising the help such results to improve on actions. This would facilitate empirical study of what ...

Retrieval-based conversation systems generally tend to rank high responses that are semantically similar or even identical to the given conversation context. While the system’s goal is to find the most appropriate response, rather than just semantically similar, this tendency results in low-quality responses. This challenge can be referred to as the “echoing problem”. To minimize this effect, w...

The present study is a first investigation on the potential influence of conversation and task involvement on quality ratings in the context of multiparty telemeetings. The results show that involvement has indeed a significant impact, and it can be larger than the effect of the tested technical degradations. This study confirms experience from the two-party context and gives an estimate of rat...