An analysis of prosodic information for the recognition of dialogue acts in a multimodal corpus in Mexican Spanish

This paper presents empirical results of an analysis on the role of prosody in the recognition of dialogue acts and utterance mood in a practical dialogue corpus in Mexican Spanish. The work is configured as a series of machine-learning experimental conditions in which models are created by using intonational and other data as predictors and dialogue act tagging data as targets. We show that utterance mood can be predicted from intonational information, and that this mood information can then be used to recognize the dialogue act.     

Automatic coding of dialogue acts in collaboration protocols

Although protocol analysis can be an important tool for researchers to investigate the process of collaboration and communication, the use of this method of analysis can be time consuming. Hence, an automatic coding procedure for coding dialogue acts was developed. This procedure helps to determine the communicative function of messages in online discussions by recognizing discourse markers and cue phrases in the utterances. Five main communicative functions are distinguished: argumentative, responsive, informative, elicitative, and imperative. A total of 29 different dialogue acts are specified and recognized automatically in collaboration protocols. The reliability of the automatic coding procedure was determined by comparing automatically coded dialogue acts to hand-coded dialogue acts by a human rater. The validity of the automatic coding procedure was examined using three different types of analyses. First, an examination of group differences was used (dialogue acts used by female versus male students). Ideally, the coding procedure should be able to distinguish between groups who are likely to communicate differently. Second, to examine the validity of the automatic coding procedure through examination of experimental intervention, the results of the automatic coding procedure of students, with access to a tool that visualizes the degree of participation of each student, were compared to students who did not have access to this tool. Finally, the validity of the automatic coding procedure of dialogue acts was examined using correlation analyses. Results of the automatic coding procedure of dialogue acts of utterances (form) were related to results of a manual coding procedure of the collaborative activities to which the utterances refer (content). The analyses presented in this paper indicate promising results concerning the reliability and validity of the automatic coding procedure for dialogue acts. However, limitations of the procedure were also found and discussed.     

Towards closing the analysis gap: Visual generation of decision supporting schemes from raw data

The derivation, manipulation and verification of analytical models from raw data is a process which requires a transformation of information across different levels of abstraction. We introduce a concept for the coupling of data classification and interactive visualization in order to make this transformation visible and steerable for the human user. Data classification techniques generate mappings that formally group data items into categories. Interactive visualization includes the user into an iterative refinement process. The user identifies and selects interesting patterns to define these categories. The following step is the transformation of a visible pattern into the formal definition of a classifier. In the last step the classifier is transformed back into a pattern that is blended with the original data in the same visual display. Our approach allows in intuitive assessment of a formal classifier and its model, the detection of outliers and the handling of noisy data using visual pattern‐matching. We instantiated the concept using decision trees for classification and KVMaps as the visualization technique. The generation of a classifier from visual patterns and its verification is transformed from a cognitive to a mostly pre‐cognitive task.     

A corpus-based approach to the multimodal analysis of specialized knowledge

Modern communication environments have changed the cognitive patterns of individuals, who are now used to the interaction of information encoded in different semiotic modalities, especially visual and linguistic. Despite this, the main premise of Corpus Linguistics is still ruling: our perception of and experience with the world is conveyed in texts, which nowadays need to be studied from a multimodal perspective. Therefore, multimodal corpora are becoming extremely useful to extract specialized knowledge and explore the insights of specialized language and its relation to non-language-specific representations of knowledge. It is our assertion that the analysis of the image-text interface can help us understand the way visual and linguistic information converge in subject-field texts. In this article, we use Frame-based terminology to sketch a novel proposal to study images in a corpus rich in pictorial representations for their inclusion in a terminological resource on the environment. Our corpus-based approach provides the methodological underpinnings to create meaning within terminographic entries, thus facilitating specialized knowledge transfer and acquisition through images.     

Towards the benchmarking of question generation: introducing the Monserrate corpus

Language Resources and Evaluation - Despite the growing interest in Question Generation, evaluating these systems remains notably difficult. Many authors rely on metrics like BLEU or ROUGE instead...     

Towards the automatic generation of software diagrams

The authors formulate the criteria for drawing dataflow diagrams and describe the placement and routing algorithms used in a system called MONDRIAN. A generalized approach to the question of software diagrams is proposed based on the authors' experience with MONDRIAN and a metasystem approach to the creation of CASE (computer-aided software engineering) environments. A formal approach to the definition of software objects and their graphical representation is given. The use of location constraints as a basis for generalized layout algorithms is discussed     

Towards a general purpose architecture for UI generation

Many software projects spend a significant proportion of their time developing the User Interface (UI), therefore any degree of automation in this area has clear benefits. Such automation is difficult due principally to the diversity of architectures, platforms and development environments. Attempts to automate UI generation to date have contained restrictions which did not accommodate this diversity, leading to a lack of wide industry adoption or standardisation. The authors set out to understand and address these restrictions. We studied the issues of UI generation (especially duplication) in practice, using action research cycles guided by interviews, adoption studies and close collaboration with industry practitioners. In addressing the issues raised in our investigation, we identified five key characteristics any UI generation technique would need before it should expect wide adoption or standardisation. These can be summarised as: inspecting existing, heterogeneous back-end architectures; appreciating different practices in applying inspection results; recognising multiple, and mixtures of, UI widget libraries; supporting multiple, and mixtures of, UI adornments; applying multiple, and mixtures of, UI layouts. Many of these characteristics seem ignored by current approaches. In addition, we discovered an emergent feature of these characteristics that opens the possibility of a previously unattempted goal - namely, retrofitting UI generation to an existing application.     

Conceptual metaphor theory meets the data: a corpus-based human annotation study

Metaphor makes our thoughts more vivid and fills our communication with richer imagery. Furthermore, according to the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) of Lakoff and Johnson (Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980), metaphor also plays an important structural role in the organization and processing of conceptual knowledge. According to this account, the phenomenon of metaphor is not restricted to similarity-based extensions of meanings of individual words, but instead involves activating fixed mappings that reconceptualize one whole area of experience in terms of another. CMT produced a significant resonance in the fields of philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science and artificial intelligence and still underlies a large proportion of modern research on metaphor. However, there has to date been no comprehensive corpus-based study of conceptual metaphor, which would provide an empirical basis for evaluating the CMT using real-world linguistic data. The annotation scheme and the empirical study we present in this paper is a step towards filling this gap. We test our annotation procedure in an experimental setting involving multiple annotators and estimate their agreement on the task. The goal of the study is to investigate (1) how intuitive the conceptual metaphor explanation of linguistic metaphors is for human annotators and whether it is possible to consistently annotate interconceptual mappings; (2) what are the main difficulties that the annotators experience during the annotation process; (3) whether one conceptual metaphor is sufficient to explain a linguistic metaphor or whether a chain of conceptual metaphors is needed. The resulting corpus annotated for conceptual mappings provides a new, valuable dataset for linguistic, computational and cognitive experiments on metaphor.     

Towards incremental speech generation in conversational systems

This paper presents a model of incremental speech generation in practical conversational systems. The model allows a conversational system to incrementally interpret spoken input, while simultaneously planning, realising and self-monitoring the system response. If these processes are time consuming and result in a response delay, the system can automatically produce hesitations to retain the floor. While speaking, the system utilises hidden and overt self-corrections to accommodate revisions in the system. The model has been implemented in a general dialogue system framework. Using this framework, we have implemented a conversational game application. A Wizard-of-Oz experiment is presented, where the automatic speech recognizer is replaced by a Wizard who transcribes the spoken input. In this setting, the incremental model allows the system to start speaking while the user's utterance is being transcribed. In comparison to a non-incremental version of the same system, the incremental version has a shorter response time and is perceived as more efficient by the users.     

Executing medical guidelines on the web: Towards next generation healthcare

There is still a lack of full integration between current Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and medical guidelines that encapsulate evidence-based medicine. Thus, general practitioners (GPs) and specialised physicians still have to read document-based medical guidelines and decide among various options for managing common non-life-threatening conditions where the selection of the most appropriate therapeutic option for each individual patient can be a difficult task. This paper presents a simulation framework and computational test-bed, called V.A.F. Framework, for supporting simulations of clinical situations that boosted the integration between Health Level Seven (HL7) and Semantic Web technologies (OWL, SWRL, and OWL-S) to achieve content layer interoperability between online clinical cases and medical guidelines, and therefore, it proves that higher integration between EHRs and evidence-based medicine can be accomplished which could lead to a next generation of healthcare systems that provide more support to physicians and increase patients’ safety.     

Glissando: a corpus for multidisciplinary prosodic studies in Spanish and Catalan

Literature review on prosody reveals the lack of corpora for prosodic studies in Catalan and Spanish. In this paper, we present a corpus intended to fill this gap. The corpus comprises two distinct data-sets, a news subcorpus and a dialogue subcorpus, the latter containing either conversational or task-oriented speech. More than 25 h were recorded by twenty eight speakers per language. Among these speakers, eight were professional (four radio news broadcasters and four advertising actors). The entire material presented here has been transcribed, aligned with the acoustic signal and prosodically annotated. Two major objectives have guided the design of this project: (i) to offer a wide coverage of representative real-life communicative situations which allow for the characterization of prosody in these two languages; and (ii) to conduct research studies which enable us to contrast the speakers different speaking styles and discursive practices. All material contained in the corpus is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.     

Towards the next generation of artificial neural networks for civil engineering

The purpose of this paper is to stimulate interest within the civil engineering research community for developing the next generation of applied artificial neural networks. In particular, it identifies what the next generation of these devices needs to achieve, and provides direction in terms of how their development may proceed. An analysis of the current situation indicates that progress in the development of artificial neural network applications has largely stagnated. Suggestions are made for advancing the field to the next level of sophistication and application, using genetic algorithms and related techniques. It is shown that this approach will require the design of some very sophisticated genetic coding mechanisms in order to develop the required higher-order network structures, and will utilize development mechanisms observed in nature such as growth, self-organization, and multi-stage objective functions. The capabilities of such an approach and the way in which they can be achieved are explored with reference to the problems of: (a) determining truck attributes from the strain envelopes they induce in structural members when crossing a bridge, and; (b) developing a decision support system for dynamic control of industrialized manufacturing of houses.     

Model mismatch analysis: Towards a deeper explanation of users' usability problems

An evaluation method is proposed based on walkthrough analysis coupled with a taxonomic analysis of observed problems and causes of usability error. The model mismatch method identifies usability design flaws and missing requirements from user errors. The method is tested with a comparative evaluation of two information retrieval products. Different profiles of usability and requirements problems were found for the two products, even though their overall performance was similar.     

Towards automatic tweet generation: A comparative study from the text summarization perspective in the journalism genre

In recent years, Twitter has become one of the most important microblogging services of the Web 2.0. Among the possible uses it allows, it can be employed for communicating and broadcasting information in real time. The goal of this research is to analyze the task of automatic tweet generation from a text summarization perspective in the context of the journalism genre. To achieve this, different state-of-the-art summarizers are selected and employed for producing multi-lingual tweets in two languages (English and Spanish). A wide experimental framework is proposed, comprising the creation of a new corpus, the generation of the automatic tweets, and their assessment through a quantitative and a qualitative evaluation, where informativeness, indicativeness and interest are key criteria that should be ensured in the proposed context.From the results obtained, it was observed that although the original tweets were considered as model tweets with respect to their informativeness, they were not among the most interesting ones from a human viewpoint. Therefore, relying only on these tweets may not be the ideal way to communicate news through Twitter, especially if a more personalized and catchy way of reporting news wants to be performed. In contrast, we showed that recent text summarization techniques may be more appropriate, reflecting a balance between indicativeness and interest, even if their content was different from the tweets delivered by the news providers.     

A model of juridical acts: part 2: the operation of juridical acts

This paper aims at providing an account of juridical acts that forms a suitable starting point for the creation of computational systems that deal with juridical acts. The paper is divided into two parts. This second part of the paper deals in some detail with the operation of juridical acts. Topics dealt with include: power and competence, capacity, form requirements, partial validity, avoidance and representation.     

Towards analysing the rationale of information security non-compliance: Devising a Value-Based Compliance analysis method

Employees’ poor compliance with information security policies is a perennial problem. Current information security analysis methods do not allow information security managers to capture the rationalities behind employees’ compliance and non-compliance. To address this shortcoming, this design science research paper suggests: (a) a Value-Based Compliance analysis method and (b) a set of design principles for methods that analyse different rationalities for information security. Our empirical demonstration shows that the method supports a systematic analysis of why employees comply/do not comply with policies. Thus we provide managers with a tool to make them more knowledgeable about employees’ information security behaviours.     

Designing with dialogue charts: a qualitative content analysis of end-user designers' experiences with a software engineering design tool

Abstract. Software engineering tools used by designers are critical to most systems development methodologies, and successful methodologies are critical to improved productivity. However, the way in which designers use and relate to software engineering tools, whether computer assisted or not, has received little attention in the design literature. The purpose of this study is to gain insight into how people perceive the process of using design tools. The study is a qualitative analysis of interview information from participants in a field experiment. Four teams of student designers used various design tools during the development of interactive information systems typical of those that might be developed by sophisticated end-users. The research reported here is an exploratory study aimed at understanding how designers use one of these tools, the dialogue charts. The broad range of purposes included the uses predicted by the reference literature on design. However, the end-user designers also used the tool opportunistically — they found a broader range of tool usage than the literature on design tools predicted. For example, they consistently used the tool as a communications vehicle among different phases of design and development. The results show that the relationships these 'end-user designers' developed with the target tool are expressed in highly emotional language. These attitudes are tightly coupled with the purposes for which the designers use the tool. The methodology uses a field experiment as a treatment and a semistructured interview with a hidden agenda for gathering data. The data analysis techniques draw on the concepts of discovering grounded theory as described by Glaser and Strauss. They further draw on the concepts of qualitative content analysis synthesized by Krippendortf and the qualitative data analysis methods described by Miles and Huberman.