This paper presents a discussion about assistive and augmentative natural language processing designed for certain disabled persons unable to communicate. Several approaches have been proposed, according to abilities of the writer. Here we distinguish two cases in the writer’s capacities: the writer knows alphabetic writing, or (s)he does not know it. In the first case, the idea is to assist the writer by completing the words or the group of words which are initially written. In the second case, pictograms are used instead of characters, but it must be decided if these pictograms represent concepts or words in a new writing system. If the pictograms represent concepts, the produced text may not correspond exactly to the wishes of the writer; whereas when the pictograms represent words, the writer has to change his (her) mental approach to write the words that (s)he has chosen in another way.

Emotions are an integral part of human decision making. It follows that emotions should take part in the decision process towards the design of more realistic artificial agents. Three psychological models for emotions are examined and a corresponding algorithm is developed for each depicting its process. A generalized multi-agent model is designed to demonstrate the implementation of each of the three methods. An agent thus represents a human capable of exhibiting emotional state in response to an arbitrary emotionally charged event of varying impact.

In affective natural language generation (NLG) a major aim is to be able to influence the emotional effects evoked in the addressee through the intelligent use of language. While previous work has shown that varying the form of the language, while keeping the content the same, can have a measurable effect on the emotions of the addressee, we report here on work which investigated which linguistic techniques to give the text a more or less positive slant contribute to these emotional effects. We report on three studies in which texts that gave positive feedback on an IQ test performance were tested for emotional effects on the recipient. The first study followed a comparison method on the sentence level, and the second study compared the texts as a whole. In both of these, participants were asked to rate the emotional effects that they thought the texts would have. On the other hand, in the third study different types of feedback were evaluated in a context of use, where participants were asked to perform an IQ test, read their feedback and report on their actual emotional state. In the first two studies, participants confirmed that the texts contained essentially the same content. The positive slanting techniques generally resulted in texts that were judged to be either positive or equal to neutral texts, although the effects were less strong than in previous work, which employed a variety of techniques, and there were a number of exceptions which impact on the usefulness of these techniques. However the IQ-test experiment did not show any emotional effects arising from variation in the form of the feedback. We reflect on possible reasons for this outcome and what it might mean for further work on Affective NLG.

The aim of this paper is threefold: (1) it explores methods for the detection of affective states in text, (2) it presents the usage of such affective cues in a conversational system and (3) it evaluates its effectiveness in a virtual reality setting. Valence and arousal values, used for generating facial expressions of users' avatars, are also incorporated into the dialog, helping to bridge the gap between textual and visual modalities. The system is evaluated in terms of its ability to: (i) generate a realistic dialog, (ii) create an enjoyable chatting experience, and (iii) establish an emotional connection with participants. Results show that user ratings for the conversational agent match those obtained in a Wizard of Oz setting.

Since the reinvigoration of emotions research, many computationalmodels of emotion have been developed. None ofthese models, however, fully address the integration of emotiongeneration and emotional effect in the context of cognitiveprocesses. This paper seeks to unify various modelsof computational emotions while fully integrating with workdone in cognitive architectures. We propose a perspective onhow this integration would occur and EmoCog, a cognitivearchitecture with mechanisms for emotion generation and effects.

It has been also demonstrated that emotional In its basic underpinning assumptions, cognitive load states (e.g., negative mood or anxiety) directly influence theory relies on the analogy between the information cognitive task performance and the operation of working processing aspects of evolution by natural selection and memory, while less evidence exists about the effect of the human cognition (Sweller & Sweller, 2006). It considers emotional content of the processed information (e.g., both biological evolution and human cognition as Kensinger & Corkin, 2003).

We address the problem of simulate democratic elections via a set of competing agents.We propose a logical model based on a set of non-cooperative agents which compete for attracting a maximum number of votes from a population. Each agent builds a set of strategies (formed by the promises, actions and proposals of the agent) used to convince to the potential voters.

Intelligent question answering systems provide specific answers to users' questions. This paper describes a unique AI system that uses online knowledge basesand reasoning tools to answers questions posed by the Sporcle quiz site.

We discuss in this paper, from a pragmatic and operational point of view, the need of a clear differentiation between functional and semantic “roles.” In the first case, according to the linguistic and computational linguistics tradition, roles are seen as relations linking a semantic predicate to its arguments. In the second, in conformity with the ontological and Semantic Web practice, roles are equated to ordinary concepts to be inserted into a standard ontology. As we will show here, the two notions can successfully co-exist in the framework of a high level conceptual modeling language.

Historically, causal markers, syntactic structures and connectives have been the sole identifying features for automatically extracting causal relations in natural language discourse. However various connectives such as “and,” prepositions such as “as” and other syntactic structures are highly ambiguous in nature, and it is clear that one cannot solely rely on lexico-syntactic markers for detection of causal phenomenon in discourse. This paper introduces the theory of granularity and describes different approaches to identify granularity in natural language. As causality is often granular in nature, we use granularity relations to discover and infer the presence of causal relations in text. We compare this with causal relations identified using just causal markers. We achieve a precision of 0.91 and a recall of 0.79 using granularity for causal relation detection, as compared to a precision of 0.79 and a recall of 0.44 using pure causal markers for causality detection.