Very young nonor hardly speaking children with severe disabilities need active guidance to stimulate interaction with their environment in order to develop their communicative and linguistic skills. Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) systems can help this process, provided that they are tuned to this specific user group. LinguaBytes is a research programme, which aims at developin...

The detection of dishonesty in computer-mediated communication such as emails, blogs, and online forums is of utmost importance for many governmental, financial, and educational institutions. Several studies have attempted to identify linguistic cues that reliably distinguish deceivers from truth-tellers, but have typically used highly artificial experimental constraints over a very limited per...

Children with developmental dyslexia show reading impairment compared to their peers, despite being matched on IQ, socio-economic background, and educational opportunities. The neurological and cognitive basis of dyslexia remains a highly debated topic. Proponents of the magnocellular theory, which postulates abnormalities in the M-stream of the visual pathway cause developmental dyslexia, clai...

Animations of American Sign Language (ASL) can make more information, websites, and services accessible for the significant number of deaf people in the United States with lower levels of written language literacy – ultimately leading to fuller social inclusion for these users. We are collecting and analyzing an ASL motion-capture corpus of multi-sentential discourse to seek computational model...

The aim of this work is to model the behavior verbal and nonverbal behavior of a Pedagogical Agent (PA) can be integrated into an Intelligent Tutoring System. The following research questions were posed: what is the nonverbal component of an educational communication? How to study this component for a computational model of plausible behavior of a virtual agent? What correlations between educat...

In this paper we examine a possible method for classifying speech acts produced by human teachers, with a view of informing the designs of intelligent natural language tutors and of providing the basis for a formal analysis of the effects that teachers’ language has on students’ learning. We argue that traditional means as initiated by the Ordinary Language Philosophers such as Austin (1962), G...

The commitment of sociocultural linguistics to the cause of social justice has been central to the discipline since its foundation. This commitment is nowhere more evident than in the educational domain and particularly in the development of sociolinguistically informed curricula and teacher preparation programs. Such programs help ensure that students who speak politically subordinated linguis...

In this paper, we investigate the multiple attribute decision making (MADM) problem based on the arithmetic and geometric aggregation operators with hesitant fuzzy linguistic information. Then, motivated by the idea of traditional arithmetic operation, we have developed some aggregation operators for aggregating hesitant fuzzy linguistic information: hesitant fuzzy linguistic weighted average (...