The death of the English National Health Service (NHS) may be slow in coming but that does not mean that it is not the Conservative-led UK government’s desired end state. The government is displaying tactical cunning in achieving its long-term purpose to remould the British state. Powell seeks greater clarity amidst the confusion but the lack of clarity is a principal weapon in the government’s...

Why ever assert clarity? If It is clear that p is true, then saying so should be at best superfluous. Barker and Taranto (2003) and Taranto (2006) suggest that asserting clarity reveals information about the beliefs of the discourse participants, specifically, that they both believe that p. However, mutual belief is not sufficient to guarantee clarity (It is clear that God exists). I propose in...

Taking a canonical perspective of an object provides rich information about its 3D structure. Furthermore, this detail has been suggested to enhance cognitive processing of the object. Following this logic, the pictogram, a descriptive symbol used to illustrate information, should be designed in 3D form. However, pictograms must also be designed simply, without shading or fine lines, in order t...

When people perform a recognition memory task, they may avail themselves of different forms of information. For example, they may recall specific learning episodes, or rely on general feelings of familiarity. Although subjective familiarity is often valid, it can make people vulnerable to memory illusions. Research using verbal materials has shown that "old" responses are often increased by enh...

UNLABELLED BACKGROUND The aetiology of juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) is largely unknown. We have established a JIA biobank in Melbourne, Australia called CLARITY - ChiLdhood Arthritis Risk factor Identification sTudY, with the broad aim of identifying genomic and environmental disease risk factors. We present here study protocols, and a comparison of socio-demographic, pregnancy, birth...

The goal of the CLARITY project is to explore the use of discourse structure in the understanding of conversational speech. Within project CLARITY we aim to develop automatic classifiers for three levels of discourse structure in Spanish telephone conversations: speech acts, dialogue games, and discourse segments. This paper presents our first results and research plans in three areas: definiti...

We present single-channel approaches to robust automatic speech recognition (ASR) in reverberant environments based on non-intrusive estimation of the clarity index (C50). Our best performing method includes the estimated value of C50 in the ASR feature vector and also uses C50 to select the most suitable ASR acoustic model according to the reverberation level. We evaluate our method on the REV...