ACUMEN: Amplifying Control and Understanding of Multiple ENtities

In virtual environments, the control of numerous entities in multiple dimensions can be difficult and tedious. In this paper, we present a system for synthesizing and recognizing aggregate movements in a virtual environment with a high-level (natural language) interface. The principal com- ponents include: an interactive interface for aggregate con- trol based on a collection of parameters extending an exist- ing movement quality model, a feature analysis of aggregate motion verbs, recognizers to detect occurrences of features in a collection of simulated entities, and a clustering algorithm that determines subgroups. Results based on simulations and a sample instruction application are shown

Recognizing speculative language in biomedical research articles: a linguistically motivated perspective

We explore a linguistically motivated approach to the problem of recognizing speculative language (“hedging”) in biomedical research articles. We describe a method, which draws on prior linguistic work as well as existing lexical resources and extends them by introducing syntactic patterns and a simple weighting scheme to estimate the speculation level of the sentences. We show that speculative language can be recognized successfully with such an approach, discuss some shortcomings of the method and point out future research possibilities.

A critical review of PASBio's argument structures for biomedical verbs

BACKGROUND: Propositional representations of biomedical knowledge are a critical component of most aspects of semantic mining in biomedicine. However, the proper set of propositions has yet to be determined. Recently, the PASBio project proposed a set of propositions and argument structures for biomedical verbs. This initial set of representations presents an opportunity for evaluating the suitability of predicate-argument structures as a scheme for representing verbal semantics in the biomedical domain. Here, we quantitatively evaluate several dimensions of the initial PASBio propositional structure repository. RESULTS: We propose a number of metrics and heuristics related to arity, role labelling, argument realization, and corpus coverage for evaluating large-scale predicate-argument structure proposals. We evaluate the metrics and heuristics by applying them to PASBio 1.0. CONCLUSION: PASBio demonstrates the suitability of predicate-argument structures for representing aspects of the semantics of biomedical verbs. Metrics related to theta-criterion violations and to the distribution of arguments are able to detect flaws in semantic representations, given a set of predicate-argument structures and a relatively small corpus annotated with them

Creating Agent Behaviors in Real-time

this paper we outline a broad and integrated approach to creating behaviors for realtime 3D embodied agents. We start with a brief summary of the sorts of instructions we wish to accommodate and the architecture we have designed and implemented to interpret and execute instructions in context. The architecture includes a parameterized action dictionary called an Actionary. Instantiated actions control a shallow software hierarchy of #nite state machines and motion generators. Then we discuss various aspects of an autonomous agent model which support selection and control of a wide range of behaviors needed in a realtime training experience. We address the issues of movement naturalness by considering a parameterized system for expressing and animating the qualitative aspects of a gestural movement. We show how parametric action representations might be build from limited observations of performed movements. Finally,we close with some discussion of near future research direction