What mechanisms drive the group size evolution of social conversations? How does schisming take place in dynamically-changing conversations? Are there any universal driving mechanisms taking place? In this work we address such questions by means of an agent-based model of conversation dynamics. The proposed model develops from simple yet realistic assumptions derived from experimental evidence,...

In spoken interactions, interlocutors carefully plan, and time their utterances, minimizing gaps and overlaps between consecutive turns. Cross-linguistic comparison has indicated that spoken languages vary only minimally in terms of turn-timing, and language acquisition research has shown pre-linguistic vocal turn-taking in the first half year of life. These observations suggest that the turn-t...

BACKGROUND There has been increasing interest in dementia care in recent years, including how practitioners, service providers and society in general can help individuals to live well with the condition. An important aspect to this is provision of advice to ensure conversation partners effectively support the person with dementia in conversation. AIMS To provide a descriptive review of the li...

A number of software environments have been developed as media to support collaborative knowledge building, typically featuring a Web-based threaded discussion facility. We have recently developed such a system, known as WEBGUIDE. The distinctive feature of this system is support for structuring collaboration and knowledge construction with personal, group and comparison perspectives. While pil...

BBS(Bulletin Board Systems) is one of the most common places for threaded discussion. It becomes more and more popular among web users, especially in China. Everyday a huge amount of new discussions are generated on BBS. It is too difficult to find hot topics. To solve this issue, we propose a novel approach to detect hot topics on BBS for any period of time. Our solution consists of three step...

Gordon Pask’s conversation theory stands as a major contribution to cybernetics, education and epistemology. Ranulph Glanville was Pask’s student. He made himself familiar with conversation theory and promoted it in his lecture and writings throughout his career. In doing so, he made significant contributions. I summarise some of these here. To set the scene, I briefly outline some of the main ...

This paper discusses issues, possibilities and existing approaches for fitting an exception handling mechanism (EHM) in CSP-based process-oriented software architectures. After giving a survey on properties desired for a concurrent EHM, specific problems and a few principal ideas for including exception handling facilities in CSP-designs are discussed. As one of the CSP-based frameworks for con...

An experimental study of asynchronously communicating dyads tested the claim that conceptual representations could more effectively support collaborative knowledge construction in online learning than threaded discussions. Results showed that users of conceptual representations created more hypotheses earlier in the experimental sessions and elaborated on hypotheses more than users of threaded ...