We use Pregroups to provide an algebraic analysis of Persian sentences. Our analysis hints to some of the profound and subtle properties of the Persian grammar, e.g. similarity of its parsing patterns to Hindi (both descendants of of Sanskrit) and similarity in parsing patterns of its causal subordinate and relative sentences. These findings are facilitated by the use of reduction diagrams, a f...

To enter Agnon's fictive universe, one must acknowledge the very central place occupied by Torah as the fabric of the world that both contains Creation and binds God to Israel. Torah, as pre-existing text, authorizes subsequent interpretations in the assumption that they are already contained within it. Using the texts of rabbinic tradition, Agnon maps out this territory in Seper, soper vesippu...

Males usually have little involvement in the dramas of social insect societies, but a newly identified Cardiocondyla ant species has been found to produce long-lived, murderous males, even before the first workers, in a new form of queen-queen competition.

In statistical machine translation, data sparsity is a challenging problem especially for languages with rich morphology and inconsistent orthography, such as Persian. We show that orthographic preprocessing and morphological segmentation of Persian verbs in particular improves the translation quality of Persian-English by 1.9 BLEU points on a blind test set.

Because it supports progress, drama embodies development and, thus, can be used to support development communication. In fact, drama is the most appropriate medium for effecting change for development because it 1) involves interpersonal communication; 2) broadens the meaning of development; 3) challenges assumptions, demands accountability, suggests remedies, and evaluates the totality of per...

A drama manager (DM) monitors an interactive experience, such as a computer game, and intervenes to shape the global experience so that it satisfies the author's expressive goals without decreasing a player's interactive agency. Most research work on drama management has proposed AI architectures and provided abstract evaluations of their effectiveness. A smaller body of work has evaluated the ...

Entertainment-education dramas can persuade because they show characters who change their behavior to improve their lives. Stories have unique power and nuance to describe people’s behavior and interactions, and their consequences. When audience members see that they could be in the same situation as the characters, stories can move them to change, too. E-E is particularly able to influence beh...

A content analysis was conducted to examine sexual consequences on teen programming. The sample consisted of prime-time television dramas that featured characters between the ages of 12 and 22 years. Two major goals guided the study. First, the types of sexual consequences in teen programming were investigated. Results showed that emotional and social consequences far outnumbered physical conse...

Drama, at least according to the Aristotelian view, is effective inasmuch as it successfully mirrors real aspects of human behavior. This leads to the hypothesis that successful dramas will portray fictional social networks that have the same properties as those typical of human beings across ages and cultures. We outline a methodology for investigating this hypothesis and use it to examine ten...