INTRODUCTION Care coordination (CC) is an important fulcrum for pursuing a range of health care goals. Current research and policy analyses have focused on aggregated data rather than on understanding what happens within individual cases. At the case level, CC emerges as a complex network of communications among providers over time, crossing and recrossing many organizational boundaries. Micro-...

Current localizationpractices suffer fromanarrowandstaticvisionofculture resulting in usability problems for IT product and design. To address this problem, this article compares user localization efforts of mobile messaging technology in two different cultural contexts with a new methodology of cultural usability. It calls for expanding thescopeof localizationpracticesand linkinguser localizat...

This paper describes a study of the interdependencies among dialog acts, task goals and discourse inheritance in mixed-initiative dialogs in the restaurants domain. Our study is based on 199 dialogs, with disjoint training (169 dialogs) and test sets (30 dialogs). Training set is annotated manually in terms of task goals and dialog acts and tagged automatically in terms of semantic and syntacti...

Introduction In this paper, we discuss how a discourse agent can manage multiple discourse goals using dynamic constraint optimization. We discuss turn-taking agents, which are agents that know how to take turns in dynamic, conversational settings. Conversation constrains an agent’s behaviour in a number of ways; for example, a conversational agent must act quickly to avoid long pauses, and it ...

Motivation The motivation for this discussion is to look at the cognitive and logical rationales of e-Learning objects, which reside in computer-based e-Learning artefacts. e-Learning objects, the system to which they belong, and the sequence of messages that form a discourse between the system and its environment are inseparable. Altogether, they formulate the “Universe of Discourse” (Wieringa...

Motivated by the recent effort on scenario-based context question answering (QA), this paper investigates the role of discourse processing and its implication on query expansion for a sequence of questions. Our view is that a question sequence is not random, but rather follows a coherent manner to serve some information goals. Therefore, this sequence of questions can be considered as a mini di...

In this paper, we set out a basic approach to the modeling of narrative in interactive virtual worlds. This approach adopts a bipartite model taken from narrative theory, in which narrative is composed of story and discourse. In our approach, story elements – plot and character – are defined in terms of plans that drive the dynamics of a virtual environment. Discourse elements – the narrative’s...