The WorldWide Web has greatly increased the number of hypermedia designers and practitioners|the people who read and write, and otherwise use, hypermedia in their day-today activities. Through practice, they have developed new communicative forms: a set of hypermedia document genres. We examine the genres that are arising on the WorldWide Web as a foil for discussing the interaction between hyp...

Using online knowledge communities (OKCs) from the Internet as informal learning environments poses the question how likely these communities will be to integrate learners as new members. Such prediction is the purpose of the current study. Based on the approaches of voices interanimation and polyphony, a natural language processing tool was employed for dialog analysis in integrative versus no...

Conversations are a useful means of structuring communicative interactions among agents. The value of a conversationbased approach is largely determined by the conversational model it uses. Finite State Machines, used heavily to date for this purpose, are not su cient for complex agent interactions requiring a notion of concurrency. We propose the use of Colored Petri Nets as a model underlying...

This contribution gives an overview about different approaches to semantic spaces. It is not a exhaustive survey, but rather a personal view on different approaches which use metric spaces for the representation of meanings of linguistic units. The aim is to demonstrate the similarities of apparently different approaches and to inspire the generalisation of semantic spaces tailored to the repre...

For approximately one century, the study of Intonation has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention, despite the notorious difficulty to analyse by ear this evasive property of spoken language. Probably, the chief impetus to this long-standing effort stems from the conviction that speech melody has a particular communicative value. Indeed, individual speech sounds do not carry an intrinsic...

It is widely accepted that gesture can serve a communicative function. The purpose of this study was to explore gesture use in congenitally blind individuals who have never seen gesture and have no experience with its communicative function. Four children blind from birth were tested in 3 discourse situations (narrative, reasoning, and spatial directions) and compared with groups of sighted and...

Systems for supporting communication in organizations should be founded on a theorY of language and communication. A well-known theorY for this purpose is speech act theorY. developed by Austin and Searle. Flores e.a. used this theorY for the design of TH E COORDINATOR. Speech act theorY however has some serious shortcomings which are brought to the fore by Habermas. His examination of Searle's...