We present a work in the field of formal ontologies, notion taken from the knowledge representation community. What we study is the concept of time and aspect described and conceptualized from linguistics. Our aim is thus to propose a formal ontology of time and aspect considering temporal concepts introduced in a formal way.

In this paper we describe how the annotation methodology adopted in our approach allows us to explain the organization of indexed references in scientific research articles. We identify the semantic values of author judgments in the text segments containing indexed references.  We use an automated semantic annotation platform to annotate our corpora. Exploiting this result, we obtain a representation of the annotation distribution on different scales. Finally, we present two evaluations of the annotation.

Scientists typically need to take a large volume of information into account in order to deal with re-occurring tasks such as inspecting proceedings, finding related work, or reviewing papers. Our work aims at filling the gap between text documents and a structured representations of their content in the domain of resilience computing by combining computer linguistics and ontological methods. The results of our research include: a thesaurus of the domain, automatic clustering of the domain documents, a domain ontology, and a tool for constructing ontologies with the aid of domain thesauri.

Providing the first few letters of a missing word in a sentence gives information about this word. This paper attempts to measure the information transmitted in that case. In order to do so, we analyzed response accuracy for open cloze questions, that is fill-in-the-blank questions without multiple choice answers. In this study, native and non-native speakers of English answered a series of open cloze questions that were semi-automatically generated. Hints were provided that consisted of the first few letters of the missing word. Results showed that question difficulty, hence the quantity of information transmitted, is related to the number of letters that are provided, to physical properties of these letters and to syllables formed by these letters. Performances did not appear to depend on letter or syllable frequency. Controlling hint level in a word completion task is critical in order to provide practice exercises adapted to student levels.

We studied the effect of post-practice reflection on learning, using programming tutors, and multiple-choice format for reflection. We conducted in-vivo controlled studies with introductory programming students from multiple schools over 3 semesters, and used mixed-factor ANOVA to analyze the collected data. We found that reflecting on the concept underlying each problem neither promotes greater learning, measured as pre-post increase in the average score per problem, nor promotes faster learning, measured as the problems solved per concept learned. We conjecture that the benefits of reflecting on the concept underlying each problem may be limited if a tutor already promotes deep understanding of the domain.

Emotions are a ubiquitous component of motivation and learning. We have developed an affective behavior model for intelligent tutoring systems that considers both the affective and knowledge state of the student to generate tutorial actions. The affective behavior model (ABM) was designed based on teachers' expertise obtained through interviews. It relies on a dynamic decision network with a utility measure on both student learning and affect to generate tutorial actions aimed at balancing the two. We have integrated and evaluated the ABM in an educational game to learn number factorization. We carried out a controlled user study to evaluate the impact of the affective model on learning. The results show that for the younger students there is a significant improvement on learning when the affective behavior model is incorporated.

The gaming industry has reached a point where improving graphics has only a small effect on how much a player will enjoy a game. The focus has turned to adding more humanlike characteristics into computer game agents. Machine learning techniques are scarcely being used in games, although they do offer powerful means for creating humanlike behaviors in agents. The first person shooter (FPS), Quake 2, is an open source game that offers a multi-agent environment in which to create game agents (bots). The work described in this paper seeks to combine neural networks with a modeling paradigm known as context based reasoning (CxBR) to create a contextual game observation (CONGO) system that produces humanlike Quake 2 bots. A default level of intelligence is instilled into the bots through contextual scripts to prevent the bot from being trained to be completely useless. The results show that the humanness and entertainment value as compared to a traditional scripted bot have improved, although, CONGO bots usually ranked only slightly above a novice skill level. Overall, CONGO offers the gaming community a mode of game play that has promising entertainment value.

With the most resource intensive tasks in games offloaded to special purpose processors, game designers now have the opportunity to build richer characters using more complex AI techniques than have been used in the past. While additional CPU time makes improved AI feasible, better tools for building agents are needed to make good interactive characters a reality. In this paper we present the BEHAVEngine and BehaviorShop which enable the creation of rich interactive characters.

Generally, learning systems suffer from a lack of an explicit and adaptable didactic design. A previously introduced modeling approach called storyboarding is setting the stage to apply Knowledge Engineering Technologies to verify and validate the didactics behind a learning process. Moreover, didactics can be refined according to revealed weaknesses and proven excellence. Successful didactic patterns can be explored by applying mining techniques to the various ways students went through the storyboard and their associated level of success.

What is the biggest difference between playing a game against a human or against a computer generated player? Why do many people believe it is more challenging to play with humans than playing with an artificial player? The big success of massive multiplayer games and the huge number of so-called "LAN parties", where players meet and play with each other, seems to be related to the human demeanor of the players. All this indicates, that the current state of game AI is unsatisfactory compared to the performance of human players. This paper introduces a tool for analyzing basic computer games with incorporated AI modules which store strategies for performing the behavior of artificial players. This sets the stage for a systematic evaluation and refinement of rule based game AI.