Modeling Narrative Discourse

This thesis describes new approaches to the formal modeling of narrative discourse. Although narratives of all kinds are ubiquitous in daily life, contemporary text processing techniques typically do not leverage the aspects that separate narrative from expository discourse. We describe two approaches to the problem. The first approach considers the conversational networks to be found in literary fiction as a key aspect of discourse coherence; by isolating and analyzing these networks, we are able to comment on longstanding literary theories. The second approach proposes a new set of discourse relations that are specific to narrative. By focusing on certain key aspects, such as agentive characters, goals, plans, beliefs, and time, these relations represent a theory-of-mind interpretation of a text. We show that these discourse relations are expressive, formal, robust, and through the use of a software system, amenable to corpus collection projects through the use of trained annotators. We have procured and released a collection of over 100 encodings, covering a set of fables as well as longer texts including literary fiction and epic poetry. We are able to inferentially find similarities and analogies between encoded stories based on the proposed relations, and an evaluation of this technique shows that human raters prefer such a measure of similarity to a more traditional one based on the semantic distances between story propositions

Inhibitor regulation of tissue kallikrein activity in the synovial fluid of patients with rheumatoid athritis

Tissue kallikrein (TK) and 1-antitrypsin (AT)/TK complexes can be detected in SF from patients with RA if components of the fluids which interfere with the detection of TK are removed. 2-Macroglobulin (2-M) in SF was demonstrated to contain trapped proteases which were still active in amidase assays. Removal of 2-M from RA SF reduced their amidase activity. However, at least some of the remaining activity was due to TK because it was soya bean trypsin inhibitor resistant and trasylol sensitive and was partly removed by affinity chromatography on anti-TK sepharose. Removal of RF from the fluids reduced the values obtained for TK levels by ELISA. Addition of SF to human urinary kallikrein (HUK) considerably reduced the levels of TK detected suggesting the presence of a TK ELISA inhibitor in the fluids. Removal of components of >300 kDa from SF markedly reduced the TK ELISA inhibitory activity and increased the values for both the TK and l-AT/TK levels in fluids as measured by ELISA. It is considered this novel inhibitor does not bind to the active site of TK but rather binds to the site reactive with anti-TK antibodies

Extending and Evaluating a Platform for Story Understanding

We summarize recent developments in our platform for symbolically representing and reasoning over human narratives. The expressive range of the system is bolstered by the infusion of a large library of knowledge frames, including verbs, adjectives, nouns and adverbs, from external linguistic resources. Extensions to the model itself include alternate timelines (imagined states for goals, plans, beliefs and other modalities), hypotheticals, modifiers and connections between instantiated frames such as causality. We describe a corpus collection experiment that evaluates the usability of the graphical encoding interface, and measure the inter-annotator agreement yielded by our novel representation and tool

GOTCHA Password Hackers!

We introduce GOTCHAs (Generating panOptic Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) as a way of preventing automated offline dictionary attacks against user selected passwords. A GOTCHA is a randomized puzzle generation protocol, which involves interaction between a computer and a human. Informally, a GOTCHA should satisfy two key properties: (1) The puzzles are easy for the human to solve. (2) The puzzles are hard for a computer to solve even if it has the random bits used by the computer to generate the final puzzle --- unlike a CAPTCHA. Our main theorem demonstrates that GOTCHAs can be used to mitigate the threat of offline dictionary attacks against passwords by ensuring that a password cracker must receive constant feedback from a human being while mounting an attack. Finally, we provide a candidate construction of GOTCHAs based on Inkblot images. Our construction relies on the usability assumption that users can recognize the phrases that they originally used to describe each Inkblot image --- a much weaker usability assumption than previous password systems based on Inkblots which required users to recall their phrase exactly. We conduct a user study to evaluate the usability of our GOTCHA construction. We also generate a GOTCHA challenge where we encourage artificial intelligence and security researchers to try to crack several passwords protected with our scheme.Comment: 2013 ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security (AISec

A Lightweight Intelligent Virtual Cinematography System for Machinima Production

Machinima is a low-cost alternative to full production filmmaking. However, creating quality cinematic visualizations with existing machinima techniques still requires a high degree of talent and effort. We introduce a lightweight artificial intelligence system, Cambot, that can be used to assist in machinima production. Cambot takes a script as input and produces a cinematic visualization. Unlike other virtual cinematography systems, Cambot favors an offline algorithm coupled with an extensible library of specific modular and reusable facets of cinematic knowledge. One of the advantages of this approach to virtual cinematography is a tight coordination between the positions and movements of the camera and the actors

The Dual Feminisation of HIV/AIDS

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Globalizations on 2011, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14747731.2010.49302

Introduction to the Symposium Convergence on Delaware: Corporate Bankruptcy and Corporate Governance

Bankruptcy is back. The use of Chapter 11 by large, publicly held firms was a subject of much debate in the academic and popular press in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. Firms such as Texaco, Revco, LTV, Federated Department Stores, Maxwell Communications, TWA, and Eastern Airlines all filed for bankruptcy during that time. The economic boom of the mid- and late 1990s, however, resulted in a relative dearth of high-profile bankruptcy cases. The recent economic downturn has moved corporate reorganizations back into the spotlight. The Chapter 11 filings by firms such as Enron, Global Crossing, the Loewen Group, US Airways, United Airlines, and WorldCom have focused attention once again on Chapter 11. Yet today\u27s bankruptcy practice has changed notably since our last wave of major bankruptcies. The most visible change in the reorganization of large, publicly held companies in the past fifteen years has been the rise of the Delaware bankruptcy court. As of 1990, a firm looking to reorganize under Chapter 11 would most likely file its bankruptcy petition in the Southern District of New York. Today, such firms look first and foremost to Delaware, Indeed, other courts are changing their practices to mirror those of Delaware. This switch in the lead venue of reorganization practice raises two sets of questions. The first set of questions focuses directly on this trend. Delaware\u27s prominence in corporate law has spawned a decades-old debate over why firms choose Delaware and whether the forces that drive firms to Delaware create a body of corporate law that advances or impedes societal interests. The rise of the Delaware bankruptcy court raises similar inquiries. In short, we need to explore why firms now choose to file for reorganization in Delaware, and whether the switch to Delaware is one that should be applauded or condemned

Toward Intelligent Support of Authoring Machinima Media Content: Story and Visualization

The Internet and the availability of authoring tools have enabled a greater community of media content creators, including nonexperts. However, while media authoring tools often make it technically feasible to generate, edit and share digital media artifacts, they do not guarantee that the works will be valuable or meaningful to the community at large. Therefore intelligent tools that support the authoring and creative processes are especially valuable. In this paper, we describe two intelligent support tools for the authoring and production of machinima. Machinima is a technique for producing computer-animated movies through the manipulation of computer game technologies. The first system we describe, ReQUEST, is an intelligent support tool for the authoring of plots. The second system, Cambot, produces machinima from a pre-authored script by manipulating virtual avatars and a virtual camera in a 3D graphical environment