In the recent article 'Conflict between anthropic reasoning and observa-tion' (gr-qc/0303070) Ken D. Olum, using some inflation-based ideas and the anthropic premise that we should be typical among all intelligent observers in the Universe, arrives at the puzzling conclusion that 'we should find ourselves in a large civilization (of galactic size) where most observers should be, while in fact w...

This paper defines and exemplifies a new computational abstraction called i-dialogue which aims to model communicative situations such as those where an agent conducts multiple concurrent conversations with other agents. The i-dialogue abstraction is inspired both by the dialogue abstraction proposed by [17] and by the STROBE model [4]. Idialogue models conversations among processes by means of...

<p>This paper emphasizes globalization as a cultural phenomenon, one that has repeatedly been neglected<br />academically. It is better known an economic phenomenon for its capitalism-related, production-oriented<br />system and growth. Thus, the global economy no longer affected by nations but transnational<br />companies. However, primarily phenomenon. Closely related ...

To the degree that citizens have participated in, or derived benefits from, social institutions that have helped cause serious, life-threatening, or rights-threatening environmental injustice (EIJ), this article argues that they have duties either to stop their participation in these institutions or to compensate for it by helping to reform them. (EIJ occurs whenever children, poor people, mino...

Language understanding is a key component in a spoken dialogue system. In this paper, we investigate how the language understanding module influences the dialogue system performance by conducting a series of systematic experiments on a task-oriented neural dialogue system in a reinforcement learning based setting. The empirical study shows that among different types of language understanding er...

People with motor disabilities often face substantial challenges using interfaces designed for manual interaction. Although such obstacles might be partially alleviated by automatic speech recognition, these individuals may also have cooccurring speech-language challenges that result in high recognition error rates. In this paper, we investigate how augmenting speech applications with dialogue ...

Distance education is a hotly debated subject in the scientific and pedagogical environment of newest period; methodological literature, issues practical theoretical nature are actively discussed (from effectiveness remote servers to ethical that arise during classes). As positive experience, article presents materials classes course “History civilizations”, which read by author at St Petersbur...