In this paper we examine whether the student-to-tutor convergence of lexical and speech features is a useful predictor of learning in a corpus of spoken tutorial dialogs. This possibility is raised by the Interactive Alignment Theory, which suggests a connection between convergence of speech features and the amount of semantic alignment between partners in a dialog. A number of studies have sho...

Ubiquitous integrated computing makes possible new workflow processes and business models which can meet the challenges from the fast growing digital convergence. An integrated information framework architecture is proposed, to cope with business challenges to merge and integrated data across domain boundaries. Sensor-data are captured and mapped onto a common (standardized) format where semant...

In recent years, the anatomical and functional bases of conceptual activity have attracted a growing interest. In particular, Patterson and Lambon-Ralph have proposed the existence, in the anterior parts of the temporal lobes, of a mechanism (the 'amodal semantic hub') supporting the interactive activation of semantic representations in all modalities and for all semantic categories. The aim of...

Two studies investigated how convergence between linguistic representations in Dutch-French bilinguals affects the centers and boundaries of lexical categories for common household objects. In Study 1, correlations between typicality ratings for roughly corresponding categories were higher for bilinguals in their two languages than for monolinguals in each language, indicating that bilingual pr...

We introduce several probabilistic models for learning the lexicon of a semantic parser. Lexicon learning is the first step of training a semantic parser for a new application domain and the quality of the learned lexicon significantly affects both the accuracy and efficiency of the final semantic parser. Existing work on lexicon learning has focused on heuristic methods that lack convergence g...

The semantic web and agents are key technologies in the development of a knowledge-intensive and intelligent service web. They each provide perspectives on working with distributed systems, both from an information and computational viewpoint. Meanwhile, grid computing has emerged as a key approach to delivering distributed computing solutions. In this special issue, we explore the relationship...

this article examines vocabulary for taste and flavor in two neighboring but unrelated languages (Lao and Kri) spoken in Laos, southeast Asia. there are very close similarities in underlying semantic distinctions made in the taste/flavor domain in these two languages, not just in the set of basic tastes distinguished (sweet, salty, bitter, sour, umami or glutamate), but in a series of further b...

Semantic Web Mining aims at combining the two fast-developing research areas Semantic Web and Web Mining. This survey analyzes the convergence of trends from both areas: More and more researchers are working on improving the results of Web Mining by exploiting semantic structures in the Web, and they make use of Web Mining techniques for building the Semantic Web. Last but not least, these tech...