This paper presents a consensus model in group decision making under linguistic assessments. It is based on the use of linguistic preferences to provide individuals' opinions, and on the use of fuzzy majority of consensus, represented by means of a linguistic quantiier. Several linguistic consensus degrees and linguistic distances are deened, acting on three levels. The consensus degrees indica...

The present study examined whether surface acted empathy led to decreased burnout among providers of emotional support without adversely affecting recipients. Measures were tested via an in-lab simulated conversation between strangers and through an online survey asking participants about real-life conversations. Study 1 (95 pairs of female participants) had manipulation failure, but still part...

In this paper an interactive pattern extraction workbench, I*Pex, is presented. The workbench comes in a graphical environment and is designed to be used in an incremental and interactive fashion with the user. Patterns can be constructed to work in combination involving specifications on several linguistic levels simultaneously, from the character level using regular expressions, parts of spee...

Texts are routinely simplified to make them more comprehensible for second language learners. However, the effects of simplification upon the linguistic features of texts remain largely unexplored. Here we examine the effects of one type of text simplification: intuitive text simplification. We use the computational tool, Coh-Metrix, to examine linguistic differences between proficiency levels ...

The shape taken by linguistic creativity at the different levels of decision involved in sentence production (phonetics, rhythm, lexical choice, semantics, syntax and narrative content) is explored in relation to existing computational models of creativity. A general outline of the possibilities is given for each level, and two specific levels word invention at the lexical level, illustrated by...

Linguistic entrainment, the phenomena whereby dialogue partners speak more similarly to each other in a variety of dimensions, is key to the success and naturalness of interactions. While there is considerable evidence for both lexical and acoustic-prosodic entrainment, little work has been conducted to investigate the relationship between these two different modalities using the same measures ...

This paper describes the CoMeT system, our contribution to the SemEval 2013 Task 7 challenge, focusing on the task of automatically assessing student answers to factual questions. CoMeT is based on a meta-classifier that uses the outputs of the sub-systems we developed: CoMiC, CoSeC, and three shallower bag approaches. We sketch the functionality of all sub-systems and evaluate their performanc...