An emotion-related channel was combined with electronic chat in a 3D virtual communication environment. Users can convey specific feelings by manipulating the facial expressions and gestures of their 3D characters (avatars). To examine the effects of the emotion-related channel, an experiment was carried out in two elementary schools with fiftyfive student participants. It was found that the ch...

A number of authors have argued that the fact that certain indexicals depend for their reference-determination on the speaker’s referential intentions demonstrates the inadequacy of associating such expressions with functions from contexts to referents (characters). By distinguishing between different uses to which the notion of context is put in these argument, I show that this line of argumen...

Say Anything is a text-based interactive digital storytelling application that differs from other systems in its emphasis on the ability of users to create a narrative in any domain that they wish. The user and computer take turns in writing sentences in an emerging fictional narrative where sentences contributed by the computer are selected from a collection of millions of personal stories ext...

Users of online dating sites compete for attention from potential matches. Member profiles provide an opportunity for candidates to present information about themselves that their counterparts use to assess compatibility and desirability. In this paper, we explore how text-based similarities among users of a dating site impact their success in attracting attention. The principle of homophily pr...

This paper proposes a novel method to extract paraphrases of Japanese noun phrases from a set of documents. The proposed method consists of three steps: (1) retrieving passages using character-based index terms given a noun phrase as an input query, (2) filtering the retrieved passages with syntactic and semantic constraints, and (3) ranking the passages and reformatting them into grammatical f...

The social experience of multiplayer gaming is mediated by the communications tools that are available to use. Until recently, these have been largely text-based, but with the advent of new voiceover IP tools like Roger Wilco and Xbox Live, voice-mediated communication is becoming increasingly common. We present three studies of multiplayer gaming, where we analyse what happens in terms of the ...

The body of knowledge about the relationship between multimedia and first impression bias, which has been mainly accumulated in North America, may not be generalizable in other countries because theories ground on one culture may not necessarily apply in other cultures. To better understand how multimedia can be applied successfully in various cultures for reducing first impression bias, resear...

The study of text difficulty is considered to be an important issue for many branches of applied research. In the fields of journalism or education, for example, it is particularly important to know if (or to what degree) a given text is likely to cause difficulties for a recipient, or a group of recipients, i.e., if it is likely to be on an adequate (intended) level of difficulty or beyond. In...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and describe an approach to performance measurement of logistics processes. The paper has four main parts. First, an introduction to performance measurement is provided. Then, a performance improvement framework is presented. Third, a new improvement oriented model is outlined. In order to illustrate the approach, text-based and number-based measures fo...

the most common goal of automatic bank cheque treatment systems is the recognition of handwritten information. However, in order to do this, it is necessary to use a reliable and efficient process able to identify and to extract the information, which can then be submitted to a further recognition phase. In this paper we present a process for identifying and distinguishing between handwritten i...