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...

In MultiAgent Based Simulation (MABS), the observation of simulation results is a complex task: interactions between agents produce a large mass of results, which is particularly complex to analyze. We focus on agents' interactions by message exchanges, from the point of view of human observers. In order to facilitate the observation and the analysis of interactions, we propose an upper level o...

This paper deals with the automatic analysis of conversations between a customer and an agent in a call centre of a customer care service. The purpose of the analysis is to hypothesize themes about problems and complaints discussed in the conversation. Themes are defined by the application documentation topics. A conversation may contain mentions that are irrelevant for the application purpose ...

INTRODUCTION This paper introduces medical educators to the field of conversation analysis (CA) and its contributions to the understanding of the doctor-patient relationship. THE CONVERSATION ANALYSIS APPROACH Conversation analysis attempts to build bridges both to the ethnographic and the coding and quantitative studies of medical interviews, but examines the medical interview as an arena of...

While many aspects of tutoring have been identified and studied, off topic conversation has been largely ignored. In this paper, off topic conversation during 50 hours of one-to-one expert tutoring sessions was analyzed. Two distinct methodologies (Dialogue Move occurrence and LIWC analysis) were used to determine the anatomy of off topic conversation. Both analyses revealed that the expected s...

We provide two case studies in the application of ideas drawn from conversation analysis to the design of technologies that enhance the experience of human conversation. We first present a case study of the design of an electronic guidebook, focusing on how conversation analytic principles played a role in the design process. We then discuss how the guidebook project has inspired our continuing...