This chapter examines the defining linguistic innovations and social motivations for one of the most popular modes of computer mediated communication: the online chat. Due to its nature of being largely synchronous, anonymous, and mainly text-based, online chat offers a social interactional environment where people can experience the feeling of making new friends or acquaintances, psychological...

The focus of this paper is to investigate the possibility of predicting several user and message attributes in text-based, real-time, online messaging services. For this purpose, a large collection of chat messages is examined. The applicability of various supervised classification techniques for extracting information from the chat messages is evaluated. Two competing models are used for defin...

Over the last five to seven years the use of chat in military contexts has expanded quite significantly, in some cases becoming a primary means of communicating time-sensitive data to decision makers and operators. For example, during humanitarian operations with Joint Task Force-Katrina, chat was used extensively to plan, task, and coordinate predeployment and ongoing operations. The informal ...

We evaluate several popular models of local discourse coherence for domain and task generality by applying them to chat disentanglement. Using experiments on synthetic multiparty conversations, we show that most models transfer well from text to dialogue. Coherence models improve results overall when good parses and topic models are available, and on a constrained task for real chat data. One p...

In technology enhanced language learning, many pedagogical activities involve students in online discussion such as synchronous chat, in order to help them practice their language skills. Besides developing the language competency of students, it is also crucial to nurture their teamwork competencies for today’s global and complex environment. Language communication is an important glue of team...

Data generated by video applications are rarely mined for context in order to augment and improve user experiences. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach to extract context from video streams dynamically. As a case study we apply this approach in a context based multimedia chat application. In particular, this paper discusses how we perform video stream analysis to recognize faces an...

This study investigated the effects of transformational and transactional leadership styles and communication media on team interaction styles and outcomes. Teams communicated through one of the following three ways: (a) face-to-face, (b) desktop videoconference, or (c) text-based chat. Results indicated that transformational and transactional leadership styles did not affect team interaction s...