This paper describes a robust system for information extraction (IE) from spoken language data. The system extends previous hidden Markov model (HMM) work in IE, using a state topology designed for explicit modeling of variablelength phrases and class-based statistical language model smoothing to produce state-of-the-art performance for a wide range of speech error rates. Experiments on broadca...

As a low-cost ressource that is up-to-date, Wikipedia recently gains attention as a means to provide cross-language brigding for information retrieval. Contradictory to a previous study, we show that standard Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) can extract cross-language information that is valuable for IR by simply normalizing the training data. Furthermore, we show that LDA and Explicit Semanti...

Computing semantic relatedness of natural language texts is a key component of tasks such as information retrieval and summarization, and often depends on knowledge from a broad range of real-world concepts and relationships. We address this knowledge integration issue with a method of computing semantic relatedness using personalized PageRank (random walks) on a graph derived from Wikipedia. T...

The automatic student answer assessment problem is challenging because it requires natural language understanding. This problem is even more challenging in conversational Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) because in such conversations the speakers develop common ground as the dialogue proceeds, which means contextual information from previous utterances in the dialogue is heavily relied upon t...

We focus on a class of models used for representing the dynamics between a discrete set of probabilistic events in a continuous-time setting. The proposed framework offers tractable learning and inference procedures and provides compact state representations for processes which exhibit variable delays between events. The approach is applied to a heart sound labeling task that exhibits long-rang...

Despite their purported neuroanatomic and functional isolation, empirical evidence suggests that sometimes conscious explicit processes can influence implicit motor skill learning. Our goal was to determine if the provision of explicit information affected implicit motor-sequence learning after damage to the basal ganglia. Individuals with stroke affecting the basal ganglia (BG) and healthy con...

Information security is an important aspect that should be considered during system development. Analyzing the specification of a system enables detecting flaws at early stage of a system development. An agent knowledge of the exchanged information and its nature is essential for analyzing systems. An agent can enrich its knowledge by receiving information as messages and producing new informat...

Artifact flow represents an important aspect of teaching/learning processes, especially in CSCL situations in which complex relationships may be found. However, explicit modeling of CSCL processes with artifact flow may increase the cognitive load and associated effort of the teachers-designers and therefore decrease the efficiency of the design process. The empirical study, reported in this pa...