—This article describes the design of the two application scenarios of the Virtual Human project and its integration into the Virtual Human system. This includes overall concepts and considerations of the demonstrators for the two application scenarios (learning, edutainment) as well as underlying methodic-didactic aspects for knowledge transmission and narrative concepts for story structure an...

Traditional research on situation models has examined the accessibility of locations and objects during narrative experiences. These studies have described a ubiquitous gradient effect: Spatial locations and objects in reader focus are more accessible than locations farther from this focus, with accessibility decreasing as a function of distance. How might readers' expectations about character ...

For many kinds of prefix-free codes there are efficient and compact alternatives to the traditional tree-based representation. Since these put the codes into canonical form, however, they can only be used when we can choose the order in which codewords are assigned to characters. In this paper we first show how, given a probability distribution over an alphabet of σ characters, we can store a n...

This thesis presents a novel multimodal interface for directing the actions of computer animated characters and camera movements. Our system can recognize human voice input combined with mouse pointing to generate desired character animation based on motion capture data. We compare our voice-driven system with a button-driven animation interface that has equivalent capabilities. An informal use...

MOTIVATION Frequency-domain analysis of biomolecular sequences is hindered by their representation as strings of characters. If numerical values are assigned to each of these characters, then the resulting numerical sequences are readily amenable to digital signal processing. RESULTS We introduce new computational and visual tools for biomolecular sequences analysis. In particular, we provide...

The recent rapid spread of the Internet suggests that soon everybody on earth will be able to communicate freely with each other across national borders. The 21 century will be the age of multilingualism and multiculturalism, when various languages and cultures are dynamically exchanged on a global scale. One may call it the New Great Age of Translation. In such an age, Machine Translation (MT)...

This research empirically tests whether using a fictional narrative produces a greater impact on health-related knowledge, attitudes, and behavioral intention than presenting the identical information in a more traditional, nonfiction, non-narrative format. European American, Mexican American, and African American women (N = 758) were surveyed before and after viewing either a narrative or non-...

The Interactive Storyteller is an interactive storytelling system with a multi-user tabletop interface. Our goal was to design a generic framework combining emergent narrative, where stories emerge from the actions of autonomous intelligent agents, with the social aspects of traditional board games. As a visual representation of the story world, a map is displayed on a multi-touch table. Users ...

Since the traditional word-based n-gram model, a generative approach, cannot handle those out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words in the testing-set, the character-based discriminative approach has been widely adopted recently. However, this discriminative model, though is more robust to OOV words, fails to deliver satisfactory performance for those in-vocabulary (IV) words that have been observed before...

Most of the known encoding schemes for Bengali language have a common drawback. That is characters order in the encoding scheme is different than the linguistic order. As a result, sorting of Bengali texts as per encoded value does not sort them in correct linguistic order. Even if Bengali characters are encoded in linguistic order, because of special properties of Bengali conjunct character, B...