This article is concerned with the computational treatment of Appraisal, a Systemic Functional Linguistic theory of the types of language employed to communicate opinion in English. The theory considers aspects such as Attitude (how writers communicate their point of view), Engagement (how writers align themselves with respect to the opinions of others) and Graduation (how writers amplify or di...

According to international and Mexican official statistics, there is a dramatic rise in suicide in Mexico; however, research in this area is severely limited. This is the first study of suicide notes from Mexico in the international literature. From a population of 747 registered suicides, a sample of 106 note-writers and 106 non-note writers was examined. Using the demographic (descriptive) sc...

We propose and document a new concurrent programming model, relativistic programming. This model allows readers to run concurrently with writers, without blocking or using expensive synchronization. Relativistic programming builds on existing synchronization primitives that allow writers to wait for current readers to finish with minimal reader overhead. Our methodology models data structures a...

We assess the results and implications of two projects which have developed multilingual generation tools to support technical writers and translators. These projects have employed a strategy based on two ideas: first, allow technical writers or domain experts to define the content of the generated texts through a user interface specially tailored to the domain; second, restrict the scope of th...

The illusion of independent agency (IIA) occurs when a fictional character is experienced by the person who created it as having independent thoughts, words, andlor actions. Children often report this sort of independence in their descriptions of imaginary companions. This study investigated the extent that adult writers experience IIA with the characters they create for their works of fiction....

From 10 to 30% of elementary school-aged children have handwriting difficulties. Examination of such difficulties is important given the variety of academic, emotional, and social consequences that they can impose. One such common problem is the tendency of children to pause while writing. Thus the objective of this study was to use a computerized digitizer system to examine the tendency of poo...