Chatter bots are computer programs that can simulate a conversation through text chat. Current chatter bots perform well in artificial conversations consisting of pairs of utterance exchanges like a questionanswer session where the context switches with every pair. But they perform poorly in longer conversations where the context is maintained across several utterance exchanges. Existing approa...

Topic segmentation and labeling is often considered a prerequisite for higher-level conversation analysis and has been shown to be useful in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. We present two new corpora of email and blog conversations annotated with topics, and evaluate annotator reliability for the segmentation and labeling tasks in these asynchronous conversations. We propos...

This study addresses 3 research questions in the context of online political discussions: What is the distribution of successful topic starting practices, what characterizes the content of large thread-starting messages, and what is the source of that content? A 6-month analysis of almost 40,000 authors in 20 political Usenet newsgroups identified authors who received a disproportionate number ...

The present paper’s aim is to investigate how the participants of an online learning environment employed written language in a creative way through the spontaneous use of figurative language. The content analysis showed that figurative language was a means to express the social dimension either to refer to the self, feelings and emotions, or to conceptualize the components of the virtual learn...

Emerging mobile technologies hold great promise for educational institutions seeking to extend the learning experience to an increasingly nomadic and timechallenged student community, especially at urban campuses where both faculty and students typically commute to school and struggle to multi-processes work, study and family time and location demands. The ability to reach out and engage learne...

This demonstration presents AttitudeMiner, a system for mining attitude from online discussions. AttitudeMiner uses linguistic techniques to analyze the text exchanged between participants of online discussion threads at different levels of granularity: the word level, the sentence level, the post level, and the thread level. The goal of this analysis is to identify the polarity of the attitude...

This article is based on an exploratory study on the use of blogs to support learning in an online MBA school. In this paper, the authors examine students’ perceptions toward blogs and their effectiveness. The study finds that although students are open to the idea of using blogs to enhance presentation and reflection of their learning, concerns exist on their suitability for threaded discussio...

Recent advance in digital storage technology has enabled us to archive more than 1,700 hours of video data from a daily Japanese news show in the last nine years. In this paper, to effectively make use of the video data in the archive, we first present a news video structuring method based on the chronological semantic relations between stories, namely the “topic thread structure”. Next, we int...