Computational indices related to n-gram production were developed in order to assess the potential for n-gram indices to predict human scores of essay quality. A regression analyses was conducted on a corpus of 313 argumentative essays. The analyses demonstrated that a variety of n-gram indices were highly correlated to essay quality, but were also highly correlated to the number of words in the text (although many of the n-gram indices were stronger predictors of writing quality than the number of words in a text). A second regression analysis was conducted on a corpus of 88 argumentative essays that were controlled for text length differences. This analysis demonstrated that n-gram indices were still strong predictors of essay quality when text length was not a factor.

Novel human-computer interfaces, for instance talking heads, can benefit from language understanding and generation techniques with big impact on user satisfaction. Dialoguebased intelligent tutoring systems require advanced dialogue processing, language understanding and generation components in order to assess students' natural language inputs and provide appropriate feedback. Moreover, language can facilitate human-computer interaction for the handicapped (no typing needed) and elderly leading to an ever increasing user base for computer systems. Some of the many areas emphasized by the ANLP track to include for contributions include multilingual processing, learning environments, multimodal communication, bioNLP, spam filtering, language acquisition (first and second), textual assessment, language varieties, materials development, generic classification, educational applications, information retrieval, speech processing, machine learning, knowledge representations, English for specific purposes, textual assessment indices, coreference resolution, word sense disambiguation, dialogue management and systems, language generation, language models, ontologies, and reasoning. For 2012, there were 15 submissions, out of which 10 were accepted as long papers and 3 as poster presentations.

Researchers have recognized the importance of classifying personality through discourse for many years. However, this line of research tends to focus almost exclusively on the personality categories known as the Big Five factors. Though this information is certainly valuable, it may also be useful to categorize personality based on the Leary’s Interpersonal Circumplex model which emphasizes a predictive function. In this paper we construct the data set for personality annotation among six dimensions (based on a coding scheme developed from Leary’s Interpersonal Circumplex) for players using a chat interaction in an epistemic game, Land Science. Our results indicate that overall personality annotation is reliable (Average Kappa = 0.65) with the highest reliability for the competitive dimension and the lowest reliability for the leading dimension.

Affective computing is an emerging field that aspires to narrow the communicative gap between the highly emotional human and the emotionally challenged computer by developing computational systems that recognize and respond to the affective states (such as moods, emotions) of the user. One of the basic principles of affective computing is that automatically recognizing and responding to a user's affective states during interactions with a computer can enhance the quality of the interaction, thereby making the computer interface more usable, enjoyable, and effective. For example, an affect-sensitive learning environment that detects and responds to student frustration is expected to increase motivation, engagement, and learning gains. Although the last decade has been ripe with theory and applications relevant to affective computing, these advances are accompanied by a new set of challenges. By providing a framework to discuss and evaluate novel research, we hope to leverage recent advances to speed up future research in this area.

Bill Swartout Introduced by Alan Kay at XEROX PARC in the 1970's, the desktop metaphor, which was later adopted in the Macintosh and Windows operating systems, has become the primary way we think about interacting with computers. Over the last decade, we have been developing sophisticated virtual humans at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies.

Chairs and committees of the FLAIRS-25 conference.

Officers of the Florida AI Research Society.

Special tracks are a vital part of the FLAIRS Thanks go to the authors of both accepted and rejected conferences, with 11 held at FLAIRS-25. Over 90 papers; the special track coordinator Chutima percent of the papers were reviewed by four or Boonthum-Denecke and all the special track organizers; more reviewers, and all papers were reviewed by at the program committees and their reviewers; least three. These were coordinated by the program the invited speakers; Chad Lane for organizing committees of the general conference and the special the conference; Jean Gerber for administering the tracks. The accepted submissions include 74 conference; the Florida Artificial International Research full papers (19 from the general conference and 55 Society for maintaining the conference series; from the special tracks), 27 short papers presented the Association for the Advancement of Artificial as posters (6 from the general conference and 21 Intelligence for its cooperation with the conference; from the special tracks), and 20 poster abstracts Mike Hamilton for organizing the publication that appear in these proceedings. of the proceedings; and EasyChair for hosting the review process. The program included five invited talks: Bill Swartout, the Director of Technology and Research Professor at the University of Southern California's

According to a 2008 OECD review of national policies for education in South Africa, typically only 15 percent to 18 percent of secondary school students who sit for their final year exams every year qualify automatically for university-level education; and this number seems to be decreasing as more students choose to complete subjects on so-called standard grade instead of higher grade, a trend that is especially apparent for mathematics and science, the two fields with critical skills shortages in the country. The South African tertiary education sector is quite small for a country with a population of around 50 million, with 11 "traditional" universities, 6 technical universities, and 6 comprehensive universities. The latter university types focus on more technical or vocational education. The public sector also funds 16 research institutions. In spite of these obstacles, South African universities participate in world-class research activities in many fields and range among the best on the African continent.

The second was the propensity of the computing industry toward more lucrative assignments in the service sector. Both these factors are changing, not least because leading international software companies have set up research and development centers in the country. Computer science education established itself in India in the early 1980s when the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) set up computer science departments and started offering undergraduate programs in the discipline. Research in artificial intelligence took off soon afterward when the government of India launched the Knowledge Based Computing Systems (KBCS) program in conjunction with the United Nations Development Program (Saint-Dizier 1991). A number of nodal centers were set up to focus on different areas of research including expert systems (IIT Madras), speech processing (Tata Institue of Fundamental Research), parallel processing (Indian Institute for Science), image processing (Indian Statistical Institute), and natural language processing (Center for Development of Advanced Computing).