250 research outputs found
User-System Dialogues and the Notion of Focus
In recent years, the capabilities of knowledge-based systems to communicate with their users have evolved from simple interactions to complex dialogues. With this evolution comes a need to understand what makes a good dialogue. In this paper, we are concerned with dialogue coherence. We review the notion of focus, which partly explains this property, and its use for user-system communication. First, we examine the major theories dealing with this notion. We describe what their contribution is and how they differ. Then, we illustrate the benefits of using the notion of focus and especially the improvement in text coherence. We pay particular attention to how the notion can concretely be implemented. Its integration with other techniques and theories is described. We conclude the paper by pointing out remaining issues in the understanding of the notion of focus. The contribution of this paper is to provide a classification of the theories of focus and to show the improvements they offer in elaborate user-system dialogues.</jats:p
A catalogue of the collections of Mexican amber at the Natural History Museum, London and National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh, UK
A catalogue is here provided of the pieces of Mexican amber with inclusions in the collections of the Natural History Museum, London, and National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh, both in the United Kingdom. There are 32 pieces in the Natural History Museum and 101 pieces in National Museums Scotland which contain a combined total of 557 arthropod and 13 plant inclusions. Four orders and 11 families of arthropods are additional to a taxonomic list of Mexican amber arthropods published in 2010
Nonlinear atom-optical delta-kicked harmonic oscillator using a Bose-Einstein condensate
We experimentally investigate the atom-optical delta-kicked harmonic
oscillator for the case of nonlinearity due to collisional interactions present
in a Bose-Einstein condensate. A Bose condensate of rubidium atoms tightly
confined in a static harmonic magnetic trap is exposed to a one-dimensional
optical standing-wave potential that is pulsed on periodically. We focus on the
quantum anti-resonance case for which the classical periodic behavior is simple
and well understood. We show that after a small number of kicks the dynamics is
dominated by dephasing of matter wave interference due to the finite width of
the condensate's initial momentum distribution. In addition, we demonstrate
that the nonlinear mean-field interaction in a typical harmonically confined
Bose condensate is not sufficient to give rise to chaotic behavior.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Implementation architectures for natural language generation
Generic software architectures aim to support re-use of components, focusing of research and development effort, and evaluation and comparison of approaches. In the field of natural language processing, generic frameworks for understanding have been successfully deployed to meet all of these aims, but nothing comparable yet exists for generation. The nature of the task itself, and the current methodologies available to research it, seem to make it more difficult to reach the necessary level of consensus to support generic proposals. Recent work has made progress towards establishing a generic framework for generation at the functional level, but left open the issue of actual implementation. In this paper, we discuss the requirements for such an implementation layer for generation systems, drawing on two initial attempts to implement it. We argue that it is possible and useful to distinguish “functional architecture ” from “implementation architecture” for generation systems. 1 The Case for a Generic Software Architecture for NLG Most natural language generation (NLG) systems have some kind of modular structure
- …