There has been a recent upsurge of interest in computational studies of large bodies of text. The aim of such studies varies widely, from lexicography and studies of language change to automatic indexing methods and statistical models for improving the performance of speech recognition systems and optical character readers. In general, corpus-based studies are critical for the development of ad...

Research on collaborative learning currently emphasises the need to understand the processes at work in communicative interactions between learners, as a means of discovering interactive learning mechanisms. Within this general research programme, we concentrate on the specific case of argumentative interactions, with the aim of describing how they can be constructive. A constructive interactio...

In this paper we present an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) model able to display rich verbal and non-verbal behaviors. The selection of these behaviors should depend not only on factors related to her individuality such as her culture, her social and professional role, her personality, but also on a set of contextual variables (such as her interlocutor, the social conversation setting), an...

In this paper, it is argued that Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) should be extended to also include what may be called Critical Context Studies (CCS). After a summary of the new theory of context, defined in terms of special mental models in episodic memory, subjectively representing the ‘definition of the communicative situation’ by the participants, it is argued how a critical analysis of te...

The problem we consider in this paper is to take a single two-dimensional image containing a human body, locate the joint positions, and use these to estimate the body configuration and pose in three-dimensional space. The basic approach is to store a number of exemplar 2D views of the human body in a variety of different configurations and viewpoints with respect to the camera. On each of thes...