Follow-up question handling in the IMIX and Ritel systems: A comparative study

One of the basic topics of question answering (QA) dialogue systems is how follow-up questions should be interpreted by a QA system. In this paper, we shall discuss our experience with the IMIX and Ritel systems, for both of which a follow-up question handling scheme has been developed, and corpora have been collected. These two systems are each other's opposites in many respects: IMIX is multimodal, non-factoid, black-box QA, while Ritel is speech, factoid, keyword-based QA. Nevertheless, we will show that they are quite comparable, and that it is fruitful to examine the similarities and differences. We shall look at how the systems are composed, and how real, non-expert, users interact with the systems. We shall also provide comparisons with systems from the literature where possible, and indicate where open issues lie and in what areas existing systems may be improved. We conclude that most systems have a common architecture with a set of common subtasks, in particular detecting follow-up questions and finding referents for them. We characterise these tasks using the typical techniques used for performing them, and data from our corpora. We also identify a special type of follow-up question, the discourse question, which is asked when the user is trying to understand an answer, and propose some basic methods for handling it

In-Vivo and In-Vitro Anti-Inflammatory Activities of the Aqueous Extract of Di-Herbal Formulation (Euphorbia hirta and lactuca virosa)

Euphorbia hirta and Lactuca virosa are medicinal plants that have been used in the cure and treatment of various diseases and for health care. This study aims at evaluating the anti-inflammatory activities of the aqueous extracts of Euphorbia hirta and Lactuca virosa plants. Albumin and histamine induced inflammation in mice and xylene induced ear edema were used for the in-vivo anti-inflammatory studies. Erythrocyte membrane stabilization and inhibition of protein denaturation assays were used for the in-vitro anti-inflammatory studies. Combined doses of 100 mg/kg Euphorbia hirta and 50 mg/kg Lactuca virosa, 100 mg/kg Euphorbia hirta and 100 mg/kg Lactuca virosa, 100 mg/kg Lactuca virosa only and 10 mg/kg diclofenac significantly reduced inflamed paw in mice (P<0.05) compared to control in albumin and histamine induced inflammatory test. Combined doses of 50 mg/kg Euphorbia hirta and 100 mg/kg Lactuca virosa,100 mg/kg Euphorbia hirta, 100mg/kg Lactuca virosa significantly reduced xylene induced inflammation (P<0.001) compared to control. The extracts at 1 mg/ml, 2 mg/ml and 3 mg/ml significantly inhibited protein denaturation (P<0.001) and heat induced hemolysis of erythrocytes (P<0.0001). The plant extract of Euphorbia hirta and lactuca virosa possesses in-vivo and in-vivo anti-inflammatory effects. Keywords: Euphorbia hirta, Lactuca virosa, anti-inflammatory, protein denaturatio

Learning emotions in virtual environments

A modular hybrid neural network architecture, called SHAME, for emotion learning is introduced. The system learns from annotated data how the emotional state is generated and changes due to internal and external stimuli. Part of the modular architecture is domain independent and part must be\ud adapted to the domain under consideration.\ud The generation and learning of emotions is based on the event appraisal model.\ud The architecture is implemented in a prototype consisting of agents trying to survive in a virtual world. An evaluation of this prototype shows that the architecture is capable of\ud generating natural emotions and furthermore that training of the neural network modules in the architecture is computationally feasible.\ud Keywords: hybrid neural systems, emotions, learning, agents

Virtual Meeting Rooms: From Observation to Simulation

Virtual meeting rooms are used for simulation of real meeting behavior and can show how people behave, how they gesture, move their heads, bodies, their gaze behavior during conversations. They are used for visualising models of meeting behavior, and they can be used for the evaluation of these models. They are also used to show the effects of controlling certain parameters on the behavior and in experiments to see what the effect is on communication when various channels of information - speech, gaze, gesture, posture - are switched off or manipulated in other ways. The paper presents the various stages in the development of a virtual meeting room as well and illustrates its uses by presenting some results of experiments to see whether human judges can induce conversational roles in a virtual meeting situation when they only see the head movements of participants in the meeting

Protectant, insecticidal and antimicrobial potentials of Dalbergia saxatilis Hook f. (fabaceae)

The protectant, insecticidal and antimicrobial potentials of the Nigerian plant, Dalbergia saxatilis (Fabaceae) were investigated. The dried powdered leaves of D. saxatilis were established as a control agent for the cowpea pest, Callosobruchus maculatus. Damage was drastically reduced when cowpea seeds were treated with dry powdered leaves of D. saxatilis. Doses of 0.75 g/150 seeds and above significantly reduced crop damage, oviposition and larval development without affecting the viability ofthe seeds. Similarly, the crude 95% ethanol extract and the aqueous methanol and hexane fractions of the bark extract showed insecticidal activity against adult mosquitoes at 0.2% concentration in ethylacetate. The crude 95% ethanol extracts of the leaves and bark were screened against six pathogenic microorganisms (ATCC). While the leaves extract was active against only Staphylococcus aureus at minimum inhibition concentration (MIC) 1000 mg/ml, the bark extract displayed broad and interesting antimicrobial spectra. The bark extracts gave activity at MICs 250, 125, 1000 and 1000 mg/ml against S. aureus, Bacillus subtilis, Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, respectively. The above properties demonstrate the great potentials of D. saxatilis for use in agriculture and medicine. The relevance of bioassay-guided fractionation in ensuring consistency and enhancement of efficacy and quality of phyto-medicines and bio-pesticides is discussed

Virtual Meeting Rooms: From Observation to Simulation

Much working time is spent in meetings and, as a consequence, meetings have become the subject of multidisciplinary research. Virtual Meeting Rooms (VMRs) are 3D virtual replicas of meeting rooms, where various modalities such as speech, gaze, distance, gestures and facial expressions can be controlled. This allows VMRs to be used to improve remote meeting participation, to visualize multimedia data and as an instrument for research into social interaction in meetings. This paper describes how these three uses can be realized in a VMR. We describe the process from observation through annotation to simulation and a model that describes the relations between the annotated features of verbal and non-verbal conversational behavior.\ud As an example of social perception research in the VMR, we describe an experiment to assess human observers’ accuracy for head orientation