Emerging mobile technologies hold great promise for educational institutions seeking to extend the learning experience to an increasingly nomadic and timechallenged student community, especially at urban campuses where both faculty and students typically commute to school and struggle to multi-processes work, study and family time and location demands. The ability to reach out and engage learne...

This demonstration presents AttitudeMiner, a system for mining attitude from online discussions. AttitudeMiner uses linguistic techniques to analyze the text exchanged between participants of online discussion threads at different levels of granularity: the word level, the sentence level, the post level, and the thread level. The goal of this analysis is to identify the polarity of the attitude...

This article is based on an exploratory study on the use of blogs to support learning in an online MBA school. In this paper, the authors examine students’ perceptions toward blogs and their effectiveness. The study finds that although students are open to the idea of using blogs to enhance presentation and reflection of their learning, concerns exist on their suitability for threaded discussio...

Recent advance in digital storage technology has enabled us to archive more than 1,700 hours of video data from a daily Japanese news show in the last nine years. In this paper, to effectively make use of the video data in the archive, we first present a news video structuring method based on the chronological semantic relations between stories, namely the “topic thread structure”. Next, we int...

We are modeling roles of individual messages and participants in Q&A discussion forums. In this paper, we present a mixed network model that represents message exchanges and message influences within a discussion thread. We first model individual message roles and thread-level user roles using discussion content features. We then combine the resulting message roles and the user roles to generat...

We are developing an ECA (Embodied Communicational Agent) system in Hungarian language. The ECA has to be able to carry out general chat conversations and domain specific discussions as well. The structure of the dialogue graph and the attributes of the graph nodes have to support the success of the conversation: user utterance understanding and responding, as well as repairing the “non-underst...

In conversation, a person sometimes has to refer to an object that is not previously known to the other participant. We present a plan-based model of how agents collaborate on reference of this sort. In making a reference, an agent uses the most salient attributes of the referent. In understanding a reference, an agent determines his confidence in its adequacy as a means of identifying the refe...

Our aim is to acquire the attributes of concepts denoted by unknown words from users during dialogues. A word unknown to spoken dialogue systems can appear in user utterances, and systems should be capable of acquiring information on it from the conversation partner as a kind of selflearning process. As a first step, we propose a method for generating more specific questions than simple wh-ques...

Abstract Campaign finance compliance and transparency reveal important non-policy attributes that voters care about. Using vignette conjoint survey experiments, I show in primary elections incorporate considerations into candidate selection. This effect persists even where the shares respondents’ preferred policy positions. The findings bring campaign scholarly conversation about valence. They ...