Integrating natural language processing and pragmatic argumentation theories for argumentation support

Natural language processing (NLP) research and design that aims to model and detect opposition in text for the purpose of opinion classification, sentiment analysis, and meeting tracking, generally excludes the interactional, pragmatic aspects of online text. We propose that a promising direction for NLP is to incorporate the insights of pragmatic, dialectical theories of argumentation to more fully exploit the potential of NLP to offer sound, robust systems for various kinds of argumentation support

Accessing and browsing 3D anatomical images with a navigational ontology.

The problem that our research addresses is the lack of a comprehensive, universally useful system for navigating 3D images ofanatomical structures. In this paper we discuss the organization of anatomical information in a navigational ontology, a knowledge representation formalism that supports intelligent browsing of 3D anatomical images. For the purposes ofthis project, 'intelligent' means that the computer system behaves as if it had accurate knowledge of human anatomy consistent with that of a trained anatomist (though not necessarily as complete). To give a simple example, if the user asks to see the component structures of the urinary system, the system will return to the user either a list of structures and/or a model of them, just as an anatomy instructor might do. The Vesalius Anatomy Browser provides an interface for navigating 3D anatomical images in which anatomical images are linked to a hierarchical representation of conceptual information that corresponds directly to the images displayed on the screen. The association of the concepts with images makes possible simultaneous visual exploration of anatomical information via word and image

Enhancing collaboration and community for the discipline of organizing

The overall purpose of this workshop is to strengthen the existing collaboration and community among instructors and schools using The Discipline of Organizing (Glushko 2015), to promote further innovation in digital publishing, and to enhance iSchool teaching practices through experimentation with new models of collaborative courses. Information about participation, planning materials, presentations, and follow-up artifacts for the workshop are at disciplineoforganizing.org.

Semantic Relations in a Medical Digital Library

In this paper, we describe the VesaliusTM Project, a multi-modal collection of anatomical resources under development at Columbia University. 1 Our focus is on the need for navigational tools to effectively access the wealth of electronic information on anatomy, including life-like 3D images of anatomical entities that can be interactively viewed and browsed. We describe a key component which must be in place in order to develop a flexible and reusable digital library system, namely an anatomical knowledge base containing a `nucleus' of anatomical information specifically designed to make it possible to develop a wide spectrum of curriculum applications that use and extend the information in the knowledge base. The unique contribution of our research lies in the dual focus on user needs and on effective use of knowledge representation theory in order to develop a system that makes it possible to take advantage of interactive 3D models and the wealth of other anatomical data now available

Why do users neglect suggestions?: Effects of semantic relatedness and task on word recognition

We report work in progress on the question “Why do searchers frequently fail to use potentially valuable query suggestions?” [1,2]. We hypothesize that failure is due, at least in part, to interference with the searcher’s ability to recognize a semantic relationship between the words used in a query and the words in a suggestion. In our study, we measure semantic priming as an indicator of a searcher’s recognition of relationships between words. This poster presents preliminary results from one experiment in the study

User Behavior during the Book Selection Process

We study user behavior during the stage of the book selection process in which people study the content of a book to decide whether it will be useful for their intended purpose. 24 undergraduates participated in a balanced study in which they were given a topic-book pair and asked to decide whether the book was useful for the topic; we report on the accuracy of the participants’ decisions, the extent to which they use the table-of-contents and the index, and the impact of the medium on the book selection process. We discuss barriers to accurate book selection and consider what can be learned, at the applied and theoretical levels, from further study of this activity

Extracting Names from Natural-Language Text

: We describe Nominator, a module we developed to extract proper names from natural language text, which is currently being integrated into IBM products and services. Using fast and robust heuristics, Nominator locates names in text, determines what type of entity they refer to -- such as person, place or organization -- and groups together all the variant names that refer to the same entity. For example, "President Clinton", "Mr. Clinton" and "Bill Clinton" are grouped as referring to the same person. Each group is assigned a "canonical name", (e.g., "Bill Clinton") to distinguish it from other groups referring to other entities ("Clinton, New Jersey"). Nominator produces a dictionary, or database, of names associated with a collection of documents. vi Extracting Names from Natural-Language Text TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Section 1: Some principles and assumptions . . . . . . ...

Toward a Task-based Gold Standard for Evaluation of NP Chunks and Technical Terms

We propose a gold standard for evaluating two types of information extraction output-- noun phrase (NP) chunks (Abney 1991; Ramshaw an