1,721,054 research outputs found
Synchronized Multichannel Integration Language for Synthetic Agents (SMIL-AGENT) 0.1 Specification
No full textThis documenti specifies version 0.1 of the Synchronized Multichannel Integration Language for synthetic Agent (SMIL-AGENT 0.1, pronounced "smile agent"). SMIL-AGENT allows integrating a set of independent performatives to be realized by different communicative channels of a synthetic agent into a synchronized presentation. Using SMIL-AGENT, an author can 1) describe the available communicative channels and their abilities; 2) describe the communicative acts to be realized through the channels; 3) describe the temporal synchronization of the presentation.
This specification is structured as follows: Section 1 presents the specificatio approach. Section 2 defines the "smil-agent" element. Section 3 defines the elements that can be contained in the head part of a SMIL-AGENT document. Section 4 defines the elements that can be contained in the body part of a SMIL-AGENT document. In particular, this Section defines the time model used in SMIL-AGENT. Section 5 describes the SMIL-AGENT DT
SMIL-AGENT Quick Reference
No full textOnce you understand SMIL-AGENT, use this guide as reference when writing SMIL-AGENT files. This guide has been written taking the (RealNetworks) SMIL Quick Reference as a template. (For full information on SMIL and RealSystem G2, see related pages
Mining mobile application usage data to understand travel planning for attending a large event
No full textInformation and communication technology can play a crucial role in advertising large events and in making infor-mation available for the attendance experience to be attractive, easy to plan, pleasant and engaging, and to promote the other tourist attractions of the hosting place. Few studies have focused on understanding the role of mobile applications in supporting travellers’ information needs while attending an event onsite and during the preceding travel planning stage. Starting from a concrete case study, this paper discusses the utility of mining usage data collected by a mobile application to identify patterns of adoption and context-dependent usages (in time and space) that characterize different categories of large event attendees. The findings highlight the existence of classes of users with varied travel planning behaviour, ranging from users who start looking for practical information quite in advance, to users who look for in-formation at the very last minute or just when arrived onsite. The outcomes of the study provide useful information and guidelines for designers and developers of information systems as well as for event organizers and tourism stakehold-ers. Suggestions include how to prepare information sources and adapt them to different classes of users, when to launch and advertise bespoke mobile services, what interaction aspects to trace to gather insights on visitors’ behaviour before and during the event. Benchmarking measures are proposed to evaluate the popularity of mobile applications for events. The research demonstrates the contribution that user behaviour analysis can provide to the field of electronic tourism management and marketing, for a deeper understanding of consumers’ behaviour and preferences that goes beyond standard analytics
Automatic Text Tailoring: Possible text manipulations and their motivation (exploratory study)
No full textThe purpose of this report is to highlight some of the critical issues involved in the Automatic Text Tailoring to evaluate whether it would represent an appealing and feasible strand of research to engage within the i3p group of TCC. We first briefly distinguish the computational contexts in which automatic text tailoring plays a relevant role, i.e. (i) summarization, (ii) adjusting a text for a different communicative context, (iii) reassembling a source content in a flexible way, (iv) the automatic generation of hypertext/hypermedia, (v) multi-document summarization. We then focus on the two target tasks (ii) and (iii) that seem more promising for i3p current research workplan. With the aid of some examples, we discuss how transformations in the communicative goal, modality, genre, tenor of a certain communicative context impose adjustments on the discourse structure and linguistic form of a text. We then sketch more explicitly a list of possible text manipulations that can be considered for automatic computation and how this can be supported by existing tools. A final wrap up chapter of the report isolates the topics and tasks that seem most promising and feasible for a possible investigation within i3p@TC
Exploiting the Discourse Structure for Anaphora Generation
No full textIn this paper we propose a model for anaphora generation that fruitfully takes advantage of the information on the discourse structure available during the generation process. We focus our discussion on pronominal referring expressions. We consider in particular the problem of generating a null pronoun vs. an overt pronoun in Italian. First, we propose a general rule based simply on centers comparisons and we show that this rule agrees with the results of a corpus analysis presented in the literature. Then, we propose that exceptions to the rule can be dealt with using knowledge on the rhetorical structure of the discours
TRM - Texture Resolution Module – User ́s and Programmer ́s Manual
No full textThe Texture Resolution Module (TRM) has been developed within the European Project FACILE (LE 2440). The module attempts to identify relevant semantic relations that link the current sentence to the preceding ones, by analysing the referring expressions that appear in the text. It suggests how mentioned entities are related to each other by exploiting knowledge about discourse phenomena. Since from the beginning of the TRM design and implementation, a specific application setting -that of information extraction from financial news- and an underlying text analysis environment -the Deep Analyser developed for the FACILE project- were available to help identify and specify the requirements of the texture resolution task. However, during the overall phases of design and implementation of the module we pursued in any case the goals of generality, modularity and flexibility for the new component. This justifies the TRM rule-based approach and the clear separation of the different resolutions steps, in order to simplify the tuning and maintainance of the system as well as the porting to different domains or languages. TRM can work either with full and partial analysis of the text. Therefore, the module could be integrated also in full text understanding systems: this integration -provided that the API to the underlying system does not change- would simply require an accurate tuning of the resolution rules, given that TRM can rely on more complete parsing information. Some parts of TRM can be easily customized to different theories for discourse modelling: the object oriented methodology adopted during the design and implentation of the module allows for an easy plug-in of theory dependent parts, therefore providing a flexible testing environment for alternative solutions. Furthermore, the portion of TRM in charge for the recording and maintainance of the discourse attentional state could also stand independently and could be exported alone for other uses (for example, it could be adapted to model the attentional state evolution in a dialogue system and used also with different resolution engines). In this manual, the TRM user will found a description of the approach that has been adopted to model the texture resolution process and information on how to use the module, as it is, within the FACILE information extraction environment. Appendices A and B contain a description of the functions a TRM user should know. Appendix C, instead, is intentended for a TRM programmer who wishes to port TRM to a new domain, language, or different underlying text analysis environment. The examples reported in this manual are taken from the FACILE text corpus or from real executions of TR
The Double Nature of Anaphora. A Discussion with a Flavour of Systemic Linguistics
No full textThe Centering Model has been developed to model local focus shifting strategies to deal with pronominalization. Some of its deficiencies are here exemplified and discussed. We claim that the main problem with this model is the lack of emphasis on the two roles pronouns (and more in general anaphoras) play in discourse: to identify participants in the action and to establish cohesive links among text units. We propose some ideas for the development of a new model for anaphora based on Systemic Linguistics Theory. The systemic approach allows to model in a formal and homogeneous way the knowledge resources belonging to different strata of abstraction and the interdipendencies between them. By separating out the contribution of each knowledge resource to the different metafunctions, it also contributes to a better understanding of the role played by the language in realizing communication. We are mostly interested in resources that deal with nominal anaphora and in how to organize them with respect to strata and metafunctions
Opportunities for Understanding Consumer Behaviour from Online Destination Marketing Tools
No full textBuilding Adaptive Information Presentations from Existing Information Repositories
No full textIn this paper we discuss issues that emerge in the attempt to integrate effectively techniques coming from Adaptive Hypermedia (AH) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) in order to reuse existing information to compose intelligent information presentations. In the solution we propose, NLG allows the generation of the most dynamic parts of the presentation - i.e., with the selection of the most appropriate content and linguistic realization with respect to the current discourse context and user model; the introduction of sentences comparing different objects the user has seen; the suggestion of other interesting related objects. The AH machinery allows to enrich the content and the phrasing, still allowing for personalizatio
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