No Arabic abstract
SWift (SignWriting improved fast transcriber) is an advanced editor for SignWriting (SW). At present, SW is a promising alternative to provide documents in an easy-to-grasp written form of (any) Sign Language, the gestural way of communication which is widely adopted by the deaf community. SWift was developed SW users, either deaf or not, to support collaboration and exchange of ideas. The application allows composing and saving desired signs using elementary components, called glyphs. The procedure that was devised guides and simplifies the editing process. SWift aims at breaking the electronic barriers that keep the deaf community away from ICT in general, and from e-learning in particular. The editor can be contained in a pluggable module; therefore, it can be integrated everywhere the use of SW is an advisable alternative to written verbal language, which often hinders information grasping by deaf users.
We present SWift (SignWriting improved fast transcriber), an advanced editor for computer-aided writing and transcribing using SignWriting (SW). SW is devised to allow deaf people and linguists alike to exploit an easy-to-grasp written form of (any) sign language. Similarly, SWift has been developed for everyone who masters SW, and is not exclusively deaf-oriented. Using SWift, it is possible to compose and save any sign, using elementary components called glyphs. A guided procedure facilitates the composition process. SWift is aimed at helping to break down the electronic barriers that keep the deaf community away from Information and Communication Technology (ICT). The editor has been developed modularly and can be integrated everywhere the use of SW, as an alternative to written vocal language, may be advisable.
SimDialog is a visual editor for dialog in computer games. This paper presents the design of SimDialog, illustrating how script writers and non-programmers can easily create dialog for video games with complex branching structures and dynamic response characteristics. The system creates dialog as a directed graph. This allows for play using the dialog with a state-based cause and effect system that controls selection of non-player character responses and can provide a basic scoring mechanism for games.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has raised concerns for many regarding personal and public health implications, financial security and economic stability. Alongside many other unprecedented challenges, there are increasing concerns over social isolation and mental health. We introduce textit{Expressive Interviewing}--an interview-style conversational system that draws on ideas from motivational interviewing and expressive writing. Expressive Interviewing seeks to encourage users to express their thoughts and feelings through writing by asking them questions about how COVID-19 has impacted their lives. We present relevant aspects of the systems design and implementation as well as quantitative and qualitative analyses of user interactions with the system. In addition, we conduct a comparative evaluation with a general purpose dialogue system for mental health that shows our system potential in helping users to cope with COVID-19 issues.
The number of user reviews of tourist attractions, restaurants, mobile apps, etc. is increasing for all languages; yet, research is lacking on how reviews in multiple languages should be aggregated and displayed. Speakers of different languages may have consistently different experiences, e.g., different information available in different languages at tourist attractions or different user experiences with software due to internationalization/localization choices. This paper assesses the similarity in the ratings given by speakers of different languages to London tourist attractions on TripAdvisor. The correlations between different languages are generally high, but some language pairs are more correlated than others. The results question the common practice of computing average ratings from reviews in many languages.
A basic component in Internet applications is the electronic mail and its various implications. The paper proposes a mechanism for automatically classifying emails and create dynamic groups that belong to these messages. Proposed mechanisms will be based on natural language processing techniques and will be designed to facilitate human-machine interaction in this direction.