While the far-fetched ideas brought up with imagination are shedding lights on Science Fiction Movies, occasionally ever-growing technology has been fuelled by these creative inspirations and imaginations. This article reflects on the findings of the data visualization project Dystopia-Utopia (www.dystopia-utopia.com) and investigates the existence of a common discourse that would stand out in ...

Closely related genres have complex interrelations. An antecedent genre can constrain a subsequent genre, but changing rhetorical situations can lead to distinctions between an antecedent and its descendent. In this study, we assess two genres of detective fiction to determine their hierarchical relation to one another. We use the Gramulator, a computational tool that identifies indicative lexi...

Adventure games, and specifically the textual kind that are works of interactive fiction, are actually cooperative games. How people cooperate to solve them is not well understood, however. We describe ifMap, a system to allow interactors trying to solve a work of interactive fiction together online to create a shared map. The system is based on cooperative hypermedia and combines different hyp...

Understanding others' mental states is a crucial skill that enables the complex social relationships that characterize human societies. Yet little research has investigated what fosters this skill, which is known as Theory of Mind (ToM), in adults. We present five experiments showing that reading literary fiction led to better performance on tests of affective ToM (experiments 1 to 5) and cogni...

In the context of arabic Information Retrieval Systems (IRS) guided by arabic ontology and to enable those systems to better respond to user requirements, this paper aims to representing documents and queries by the best concepts extracted from Arabic Wordnet. Identified concepts belonging to Arabic WordNet synsets are extracted from documents and queries, and those having a single sense are ex...

DIRA is a query expansion tool that generates search terms in Standard Arabic and/or its dialects when provided with queries in English or Standard Arabic. The retrieval of dialectal Arabic text has recently become necessary due to the increase of dialectal content on social media. DIRA addresses the challenges of retrieving information in Arabic dialects, which have significant linguistic diff...

We present CALIMAGLF, a Gulf Arabic morphological analyzer currently covering over 2,600 verbal lemmas. We describe in detail the process of building the analyzer starting from phonetic dictionary entries to fully inflected orthographic paradigms and associated lexicon and orthographic variants. We evaluate the coverage of CALIMAGLF against Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Arabic analyzers o...

The written form of the Arabic language, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), differs in a nontrivial manner from the various spoken regional dialects of Arabic – the true “native languages” of Arabic speakers. Those dialects, in turn, differ quite a bit from each other. However, due to MSA’s prevalence in written form, almost all Arabic datasets have predominantly MSA content. In this article, we des...

Online Arabic content is growing very rapidly, with unmatched growth in Arabic structured resources. Systems that perform standard Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as Named Entity Disambiguation (NED) struggle to deliver decent quality due to the lack of rich Arabic entity repositories. In this paper, we introduce EDRAK, an automatically generated comprehensive Arabic entity-centric...

This paper presents a preliminary study of intra-speaker and inter-speaker variability in speech production and perception with an inter-dialect investigation of acoustic vocalic space according to different phonological systems. This work aims at providing an analytic study based on individual data that might account for individual strategies. We have studied variability in vowel production an...