This article takes stock of the basic notions of Information Structure (IS). It first provides a general characterization of IS — following Chafe (1976) — within a communicative model of Common Ground (CG), which distinguishes between CG content and CG management. IS is concerned with those features of language that concern the local CG. Second, this paper defines and discusses the notions of F...

In Emergency Management (EM) teams are faced with dynamic and complex situations, often involving multiple teams and organizations working together under stressful circumstances. One of the key issues observed in emergency responses is inadequate communication. The communicative difficulties stem from various areas such as political, personal or jurisdictional. In order to improve communication...

Communicative workflow modelling is key to describing, analyzing, and designing business processes in virtual collaborative networks, such as present in e-commerce. To make workflow models meaningful and acceptable to all partners, their legitimacy needs to be checked. To this purpose, the underlying norms must be made explicit. A key class of communicative workflow models is captured by our ex...

Miscommunication is often regarded as noise or uninformative in psycholinguistic research. However, Coupland et al. (1991) suggest that miscommunication can provide rich information about how interlocutors come to communicate successfully. Successful communication necessarily needs the individuals involved to coordinate and update their mutual knowledge, experiences, beliefs, and assumptions. H...

In this paper wc first outline why pupils should be given the opportunity to visit and havc direct contact with the cultural heritage. We then propose some 'didactic itineraries' organized by museums and other cultural institutes which are aimed at specific subjects and ages of pupils. We illustrate the main organizational aspects and the people involved in the various stages of the project. 11...

This paper presents the Dynamic Emotion Representation (DER), and demonstrates how an instance of this model can be integrated into a facial animation system. The DER 15 model has been implemented to enable users to create their own emotion representation. Developers can select which emotions they include and how these interact. The instance 17 of the DER model described in this paper is compos...

This paper presents a Dynamic Emotion Representation (DER) model, its implementation and an instance of a full humanoid emotional model built with it. The DER model has been implemented to enable users to create their own DER. The instance of the DER model described in this paper represents three types of emotions, primary, secondary emotions and mood. The design of this DER is discussed with r...

In addition to words and grammar, socio-cultural knowledge is also of vital importance in the interpretation of conversations. Socio-cultural knowledge helps participants to get contextualization cues and together with other signaling channels, participants will be able to perceive the context-bound information and prepare their appropriate responses. Socio-cultural knowledge is indispensable i...

Improving the public's understanding of statistical information requires that producers or reporters of statistical messages are aware of: The nature of people's statistics literacy, The factors that affect the difficulty of statistics-related messages, The existence of individual or group differences in statistics literacy; and The information needs of different target audiences. Implications ...