Towards Entity Status

Discourse entities are an important construct in computational linguistics. They introduce an additional level of representation between referring expressions and that which they refer to: the level of mental representation. In this thesis, I first explore some semiotic and communication theoretic aspects of discourse entities. Then, I develop the concept of "entity status". Entity status is a meta-variable that collects two dimensions formations about the role that an entity plays a discourse, and management informations about how the entity is created, accessed, and updated. Finally, the concept is applied to two case studies: the first one focusses on the choice of referring expressions in radio news, while the second looks at the conditions under which a discourse entity can be mentioned as a pronoun.Diskursentitäten sind ein wichtiger Konstrukt in der Computerlinguistik. Sie führen eine zusätzliche Repräsentationsebene ein zwischen referierenden Ausdrücken, und dem, auf das diese Ausdrücke referieren: die Ebene der mentalen Repräsentation. In dieser Dissertation erkunde ich zunächst einige semiotische und kommunikationstheoretische Aspekte von Diskursentitäten. Danach führe ich den Begriff des "Entitätenstatus" ein. Entitätenstatus ist eine Meta-Variable, die zwei Dimensionen von Information über eine Diskursentität vereinigt: Struktur-Informationen über die Rolle, die eine Entität im Diskurs spielt, und Verwaltungs-Informationen über Erstellung, Zugriff und Update. Dieser Begriff wird schlussendlich auf zwei Fallstudien angewendet: die erste Studie konzentriert sich auf die Wahl referierender Ausdrücke in Radionachrichten, während die zweite Studie die Bedingungen untersucht, in denen eine Diskursentität als Pronomen erwähnt werden kann

Designing Usable and Acceptable Reminders for the Home

Electronic reminders can play a key role in enabling people to manage their care and remain independent in their own homes for longer. The MultiMemoHome project aims to develop reminder designs that are accessible and usable for users with a range of abilities and preferences. In an initial exploration of key design parameters, we surveyed 378 adults from all age groups online (N=206) and by post (N= 172). The wide spread of preferences that we found illustrates the importance of adapting reminder solutions to individuals. We present two reusable personas that emerged from the research and discuss how questionnaires can be used for technology transfer

Activity monitoring in patients with depression : A systematic review

Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Peer reviewedPreprin

Learning Dialogue Strategies from Older and Younger Simulated Users

Older adults are a challenging user group because their behaviour can be highly variable. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study where dialogue strategies are learned and evaluated with both simulated younger users and simulated older users. The simulated users were derived from a corpus of interactions with a strict system-initiative spoken dialogue system (SDS). Learning from simulated younger users leads to a policy which is close to one of the dialogue strategies of the underlying SDS, while the simulated older users allow us to learn more flexible dialogue strategies that accommodate mixed initiative. We conclude that simulated users are a useful technique for modelling the behaviour of new user groups

Prosodic Correlates Of Referent Status

Prosodic correlates of 6 referent status taxonomies and 3 distance-from-last-mention heuristics both on the acoustic and on the symbolic level (ToBI) were investigated in a corpus of short news reports read by 6 professional newsreaders. Symbolic correlates are found mainly for pronouns, acoustic correlates for nouns and proper names. However, both form and extent of these correlates varies considerably between speakers. 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 What is given? Prosody can have many functions, among these signalling "new" information. It is frequently assumed that discoursenew information tends to be accented, and discourse-old information to be deaccented. But what exactly is this givenness ? A popular operationalization is that entities which have already been mentioned in the discourse are given, all others new [11, 5]. Frequently, an item is also regarded as new if the distance to the last mention is more than one sentence. However, givenness of information and givenness of discourse r..