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A Cultural Computing Approach to Interactive Narrative: The Case of the Living Liberia Fabric

AAAI Conferences

This position paper presents an approach to computational narrative based in cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics accounts of conceptual blending, metaphor, and narrative, multimedia semantics, human-centered interface design, and digital media art practice. In particular, as a case study, we describe the Living Liberia Fabric, an AI-based interactive narrative system developed in affiliation with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Liberia to memorialize a fourteen-year civil war. The Living Liberia Fabric project is led by Fox Harrell and executed in the Imagination, Computation, and Expression (ICE) Laboratory at Georgia Tech. The system exemplifies a cultural computing approach (grounding computing practices in a wider range of specific cultural traditions and values than those that are privileged in computer science).


High-dimensional Graphical Model Search with gRapHD R Package

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This paper presents the R package gRapHD for efficient selection of high-dimensional undirected graphical models. The package provides tools for selecting trees, forests and decomposable models minimizing information criteria such as AIC or BIC, and for displaying the independence graphs of the models. It has also some useful tools for analysing graphical structures. It supports the use of discrete, continuous, or both types of variables simultaneously.


Enhancing Affective Communication in Embodied Conversational Agents

AAAI Conferences

The Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are computergenerated motivation for the study of ECAs, inside PRAIA project, characters whose purpose is to exhibit the same started with the belief that ECAs represent a promising solution properties as humans in face-to-face conversation. The general for responding appropriately to student's in educational goal of researchers in the field of ECAs is to create environments. This work, however, cannot be placed inside agents that can be more natural, believable and easy to use. the "task and Application domains" concentration of the taxonomy Due to the broad scope of research and the multidisciplinary presented above. We are not interested in designing of the field, many other investigations can arise in many different and implementing an ECA to meet the needs and fill a suitable areas, leading researchers to face numerous questions: role within one specific educational environment. We What kind of embodiment to use? What parts of the body to believe that making a general contribution in other concentrations represent? What kind of modalities to explore? What personality will increase the possibilities of future research inside model to consider? Will the ECA have emotions?


A Survey of Paraphrasing and Textual Entailment Methods

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

Paraphrasing methods recognize, generate, or extract phrases, sentences, or longer natural language expressions that convey almost the same information. Textual entailment methods, on the other hand, recognize, generate, or extract pairs of natural language expressions, such that a human who reads (and trusts) the first element of a pair would most likely infer that the other element is also true. Paraphrasing can be seen as bidirectional textual entailment and methods from the two areas are often similar. Both kinds of methods are useful, at least in principle, in a wide range of natural language processing applications, including question answering, summarization, text generation, and machine translation. We summarize key ideas from the two areas by considering in turn recognition, generation, and extraction methods, also pointing to prominent articles and resources.


Using Local Alignments for Relation Recognition

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

Aiming at accurate recognition of relations, we introduce local alignment kernels and explore various possibilities of using them for this task. We give a definition of a local alignment (LA) kernel based on the Smith-Waterman score as a sequence similarity measure and proceed with a range of possibilities for computing similarity between elements of sequences. We show how distributional similarity measures obtained from unlabeled data can be incorporated into the learning task as semantic knowledge. Our experiments suggest that the LA kernel yields promising results on various biomedical corpora outperforming two baselines by a large margin. Additional series of experiments have been conducted on the data sets of seven general relation types, where the performance of the LA kernel is comparable to the current state-of-the-art results.


Training a Multilingual Sportscaster: Using Perceptual Context to Learn Language

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research

We present a novel framework for learning to interpret and generate language using only perceptual context as supervision. We demonstrate its capabilities by developing a system that learns to sportscast simulated robot soccer games in both English and Korean without any language-specific prior knowledge. Training employs only ambiguous supervision consisting of a stream of descriptive textual comments and a sequence of events extracted from the simulation trace. The system simultaneously establishes correspondences between individual comments and the events that they describe while building a translation model that supports both parsing and generation. We also present a novel algorithm for learning which events are worth describing. Human evaluations of the generated commentaries indicate they are of reasonable quality and in some cases even on par with those produced by humans for our limited domain.


LEXSYS: Architecture and Implication for Intelligent Agent systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

LEXSYS, (Legume Expert System) was a project conceived at IITA (International Institute of Tropical Agriculture) Ibadan Nigeria. It was initiated by the COMBS (Collaborative Group on Maize-Based Systems Research in the 1990. It was meant for a general framework for characterizing on-farm testing for technology design for sustainable cereal-based cropping system. LEXSYS is not a true expert system as the name would imply, but simply a user-friendly information system. This work is an attempt to give a formal representation of the existing system and then present areas where intelligent agent can be applied.


Whoโ€™s Calling? Demographics of Mobile Phone Use in Rwanda

AAAI Conferences

But whereas in the general Rwandan populace males tend Despite the increasing ubiquity of mobile phones in the developing to be much better educated (76.3% of males are literate, but world, remarkably little is known about the structure only 64.7% of females), among mobile phone users it is the and demographics of the mobile phone market. While a women who achieve higher levels of education: the median few qualitative studies have detailed social norms of phone woman completes secondary school, while the median man use in specific communities (Donner 2007; Burrell 2009), does not (t 4.79). Table 1 shows a few statistics on asset and a handful of quantitative researchers have begun to analyze ownership, with associated sampling error.


Causal Structure Learning for Famine Prediction

AAAI Conferences

Food shortages are increasing in many areas of the world. In this paper, we consider the problem of understanding the causal relationships between socioeconomic factors in a developing-world household and their risk of experiencing famine. We analyse the extent to which it is possible to predict famine in a household based on these factors, looking at a data collected from 5404 households in Uganda. To do this we use a set of causal structure learning algorithms, employed as a committee that votes on the causal relationships between the variables. We contrast prediction accuracy of famine based on feature sets suggested by our prior knowledge and by the models we learn.


Using Data Mining to Combat Infrastructure Inefficiencies: The Case of Predicting Nonpayment for Ethiopian Telecom

AAAI Conferences

Data mining and machine learning technologies for business applications have evolved over the past two decades, and are regularly applied in contemporary organizations to everything from manufacturing to online advertising in fields ranging from health care to motor racing. Unfortunately, data mining techniques are not applied as often to problems in the developing world. Despite the fact that some industries, such as banks, airlines, courts, and telecommunications firms, necessitate data storage as part of their business process. We argue that data mining could be used to reduce infrastructure inefficiencies, which is one of the largest problems faced by Africa. We demonstrate that we can potentially reduce the infrastructure inefficiency of the Ethiopian telecommunications industry by ranking customers according to their likelihood of nonpayment using a data mining approach.