This report compared production of infinitival object complements during conversational language sampling to production on an elicitation task. Subjects included 25 children between the ages of 3;7 and 5;4. The children produced more two-noun infinitives and produced infinitives with more main verbs on the elicitation task. In the conversational samples, the children produced infinitives almost...

This paper describes two systems using embodied conversational agents (ECAs) for language learning. The first system, called Ville, is a virtual language teacher for vocabulary and pronunciation training. The second system, a dialogue system called DEAL, is a role-playing game for practicing conversational skills. Whereas DEAL acts as a conversational partner with the objective of creating and ...

Conversational agents are exploding in popularity. However, much work remains in the area of non goal-oriented conversations, despite significant growth in research interest over recent years. To advance the state of the art in conversational AI, Amazon launched the Alexa Prize, a 2.5-million dollar university competition where sixteen selected university teams built conversational agents to de...

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) often results in a number of short- and long-time side effects including memory impairment for past and current events, which can last for several months after ECT treatment. It has been suggested that unilateral ECT (uECT) with electrodes placed over the non-dominant (typically right) hemisphere significantly reduces side effects, especially memory disturbances....

We previously found a dominant eye perceptional advantage in feature search (Vision Research, 2006). We now ask if this advantage extends to difficult conjunction search, which requires focused attention and depends on different cortical hierarchy levels. We determined eye dominance by the Hole-in-the-Card test. Using red-green glasses, subjects viewed a briefly presented, backward-masked, arra...

The most dramatic example of experience-dependent cortical plasticity is the shift in ocular dominance that occurs in visual cortex as a consequence of monocular deprivation during early postnatal life. Many of the basic properties of this type of synaptic plasticity have been described in detail. The important challenge that remains is to understand the molecular basis for these properties. By...

Conversational Informatics. Edited by Toyoaki Nishida c © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd This is a Book Title Name of the Author/Editor c © XXXX John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 2 WHY EMOTIONS SHOULD BE INTEGRATED INTO CONVERSATIONAL AGENTS When building conversational agents that are to take part in social interaction with humans, an important question is whether psychological concepts like emotions or per...

Hebbian and homeostatic plasticity together refine neural circuitry, but their interactions are unclear. In most existing models, each form of plasticity directly modifies synaptic strength. Equilibrium is reached when the two are inducing equal and opposite changes. We show that such models cannot reproduce ocular dominance plasticity (ODP) because negative feedback from the slow homeostatic p...

We introduce the problem of Weak Dominance Drawing for general directed acyclic graphs and we show the connection with the linear extension diameter of a partial order P . We present complexity results and bounds.