Conversational spoken dialogue systems that interact with the user rather than merely 1 reading text can be equipped with hesitations to manage the dialogue flow and the users’ attention. 2 Based on a series of empirical studies, we built an elaborated hesitation synthesis strategy for 3 dialogue systems that inserts hesitations of scalable extent wherever needed in the ongoing 4 utterance. So ...

Many network applications rely on stochastic QoS guarantees. With respect to loss-related performance, the Effective Bandwidth/Capacity theory has proved useful for calculating loss probabilities in queues with complex inputand server-processes and for formulating simple admission control tests to ensure associated QoS guarantees. This success has motivated the application of the theory for del...

Wireless networking has become an important area of research in academic and industry. The main objectives of this paper is to gain in-depth knowledge about the Wi-FiWiMAX technology and how it works and understand the problems about the WiFiWiMAX technology in maintaining and deployment. The challenges in wireless networks include issues like security, seamless handover, location and emergency...

With interest in health economics growing, there is a demand for valid methods for measuring health-related quality of life (HRQL) in asthma using utilities. The aims of this study were to develop disease-specific versions of the standard gamble and rating scale, to compare their measurement properties with those of the Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaire (AQLQ) and the Medical Outcomes Survey...

BACKGROUND To evaluate the effectiveness and patient satisfaction with the use of oxybutynin for treating axillary hyperhidrosis in a large series of patients. METHODS One hundred two patients with axillary hyperhidrosis were treated with oxybutynin. During the first week, patients received 2.5 mg of oxybutynin once a day in the evening. From the 8th to the 42nd day, they received 2.5 mg twic...

Timely adoption of new varieties is critical to profitable peach production, and peach quality is a primary factor driving adoption. An adoption model for peach varieties is estimated, incorporating grower evaluations of peach quality. The model identifies the impact of farm characteristics such as the farmer's quality preferences, on-farm agronomic and orchard conditions, as well as geographic...

Machine translation (MT) quality is evaluated through comparisons between MT outputs and the human translations (HT). Traditionally, this evaluation relies on form related features (e.g. lexicon and syntax) and ignores the transfer of meaning reflected in HT outputs. Instead, we evaluate the quality of MT outputs through meaning related features (e.g. polarity, subjectivity) with two experiment...

Exercise behaviour and sleep are both important health indicators that demonstrate significant decreases with age, and remain modifiable well into later life. The current investigation examined both the chronic and acute relationships between exercise behaviour and self-reported sleep in older adults through a secondary analysis of a clinical trial of a lifestyle intervention. Seventy-nine comm...

Quality of Service routing for multicast enables a group member to find and install a branch of the multicast tree that can meet its QoS constraints. The most promising protocols in this area use receiver-oriented path searching heuristics to find feasible routes. In this paper, we examine the performance of the path searching heuristics used by these protocols, to determine which techniques ar...