Chat tools are nowadays an integral part of many collaborative e-learning environments. However, standard chat tools suffer from important coordination and coherence deficiencies. In this paper we propose an open source generic framework for building malleable structured chat applications. Users can strengthen or relax constraints when they want during a chat session. The paper shows some demon...

Helping behavior is a significant part of social learning process in online games. One type of such a behavior is answering questions in a chat. We provide a method to detect if the question asked in a chat was answered and by whom. Proposed method is based on topic modeling for chat messages and comparison of a detected topic of question with a topic of possible reply. We show its efficiency o...

We present the Ubuntu Chat Corpus as a data source for multiparticipant chat analysis. This addresses the problem of the lack of a large, publicly suitable corpora for research in this medium. The advantages of using this corpus for research is its large number of chat messages, its multiple languages, its technical nature, and all of the original chat messages are in the public domain.

Scholars have argued that the Internet could bring about the realization of an electronic global village, with no race, gender, infirmities, or the social problems that often accompany these physical indicators of difference. In this study, we explored this issue by conducting content and discourse analyses of online conversations about race and ethnicity in teen chat rooms. A key focus of our ...

In this article, we address the problem of confusion and co-text-loss in chat communication, identify requirements for a solution, discuss related work and present a new approach for addressing co-text loss in text-based chats. We report about first experiences with our solution and give an outlook on future work directions. The core idea of our solution MuViChat (multiple-visualization chat) i...

Recently, online video chat services are becoming increasingly popular. While experiencing tremendous growth, online video chat services have also become yet another spamming target. Unlike spam propagated via traditional medium like emails and social networks, we find that spam propagated via online video chat services is able to draw much larger attention from the users. We have conducted sev...

Introduction Cri du chat syndrome is a rare genetic disorder due to deletion of variable length of short arm of chromosome 5(5p). It mainly presents with typical cat like cry, facial dysmorphism, poor growth with feeding problems and severe cognitive, speech, and motor delays. Case Report We present here a one year old child who did not presented with typical features but presented with recurre...

Choline acetyltransferase (ChAT; EC ) catalyzes the reversible synthesis of acetylcholine (ACh) from acetyl CoA and choline at cholinergic synapses. Mutations in genes encoding ChAT affecting motility exist in Caenorhabditis elegans and Drosophila, but no CHAT mutations have been observed in humans to date. Here we report that mutations in CHAT cause a congenital myasthenic syndrome associated ...

Ciliary neurotrophic factor (CNTF) influences the levels of choline acetyltransferase (ChAT) and tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) in cultures of dissociated sympathetic neurons from newborn rats. In the presence of CNTF both the total and specific activity of ChAT was increased 7 d after culture by 15- and 18-fold, respectively, as compared to cultures kept in the absence of CNTF. Between 3 and 21 d i...