all publications (36)

This study examines how a social network profile's lists of interests--music, books, movies, television shows, etc.--can function as an expressive arena for taste performance. By composing interest tokens around a theme, profile users craft their "taste statements." First, socioeconomic and aesthetic influences on taste are considered, and the expressivity of ...

Beyond being moral and intellectual, we believe in our heart of hearts that true happiness endures and surpasses all tests of time--a criterion that sometimes proves too challenging for those who stake happiness on but a handful of epic life events. Felicitously, robustness is the strong suit of the small ... [English version]

My view of aesthetics is much closer to Freud"s. His insight was that the experience of art and beauty arises when everyday situations cause the unconscious mind to erupt with emotion. Using that revolutionary idea, Freud was able to interpret dreams and laughter--two central problems of aesthetics. Freud"s explanation emboldens ...

The human-grown semantic web has already proven its great potential. By researching semantic technologies to exploit real-world system usage, to cope with subjectivity, and to enhance interpretation using cultural context, we can create smarter systems to harness and enhance humans" intrinsic semantic productivity.

In this paper, we tried to gain insights into how men and women perceive day-by-day events, and what they most value in their daily experiences, by looking at a very large number of diary entries extracted from the blogosphere. Our analysis of gender distinctions revealed that women's and men's sensibilities ...

But where is this in-between and how can a bricoleur find this space? Bhabha gives away the secret--it is located in "those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences." The bricoleur is accustomed to undermining one culture"s teachings with the teachings of another, but if ... [English version]

Popular online social networks such as Friendster and MySpace do more than simply reveal the superficial structure of social connectedness--the rich meanings bottled within social network profiles themselves imply deeper patterns of culture and taste. If these latent semantic fabrics of taste could be harvested formally, the resultant resource would ...

Our capacity for aesthetics and affectedness is one of the most celebrated bastions of humanity. Underlying our explicit knowledge and rationality is a faculty for judgment--the impulsion to prefer, to view the world through our individual lenses of taste. An interesting intellectual question is: can a computer model a person"s ...

What is an artwork and how could a machine become artist? This paper addresses the provocative question by theorizing a computational model of aesthetics and implementing the Aesthetiscope--a computer program that portrays aesthetic impressions of text and renders an abstract color grid artwork reminiscent of early twentieth century abstract expressionism. ...

Whereas ontology and metadata systems are bloating with semantic relation diversity, a semantic fabric is homogenous in its relation type (they are all affinity scores) and its method of reasoning (spreading activation). Because a semantic fabric represents just one semantic dimension, it can do it exhaustively and yield a very ...

Typically performance is a display for others, and is time-limited. But if we also regard everyday life as a performance, we see that it is a continuous improvisation--a multi-faceted dance with an audience that is our social and cultural milieu. In moments of self-reflection, we ourselves motivate this performance, seizing ...

This paper presents a new answer to one very old question, "What's for dinner?" Synesthetic Recipes is a graphical interface which allows a person to brainstorm dinner recipe ideas by describing how they imagine the recipe should taste (e.g. "hearty, mushy, moist, aromatic"); to keep mindful of the tastebuds of ...

Moorman & Ram"s revolt against the grain of the classical AI narrative understanding literature emboldens us in our task of aesthetic reading, which is the topic of this paper. Aesthetic reading is not reading purely for information. It is an emotionalized and personal reading, whereby the text"s primary purpose is ...

Another confluence feature is a taste clique. Visible in Figure 2, for example, we can see that "Sonny Rollins," is straddling two cliques with strong internal cohesion. While the identity descriptors are easy to articulate and can be expected to be given in the special interests category of the profile, ...

We posed the aesthetics of narrative as problematics of articulation, the letter, and the spirit. We established the letter as the agency of social language, of the explicit, known, mundane, habituated, and thus, unaesthetic. In contrast, the spirit is the agency of the aesthetic; it is an amorphous, anomic space ...

Recipe for Happiness: Go shop for something new -- something cool, make sure that you love it. Then have lots of food, for dinner preferably, as the times of breakfast and lunch are to be avoided. Consider also including a new, hot taste, and one of your favorite drinks. Then ...

A key to improving at any task is frequent feedback from people whose opinions we care about: our family, friends, mentors, and the experts. However, such input is not usually available from the right people at the time it is needed most, and attaining a deep understanding of someone else"s ...

This paper introduces an approach for graphically visualizing the affective structure of a text document. A document is first affectively analyzed using a unique textual affect sensing engine, which leverages commonsense knowledge to classify text more reliably and comprehensively than can be achieved with keyword spotting methods alone. Using this ...

ACM IUI "Outstanding Paper Award" Recipient. This paper presents a novel way for assessing the affective qualities of natural language and a scenario for its use. Previous approaches to textual affect sensing have employed keyword spotting, lexical affinity, statistical methods, and handcrafted models. This paper demonstrates a new approach, using ...

Saurus produces interesting results for larger bodies of text as well. In a speech made in Sept. 2005, U.S. Senator John Kerry criticized the government's response to Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans: "The incompetence of Katrina's response is not reserved to a hurricane. There's an enormous gap between American's ...

Write a program to generate 10000 random numbers between 0 and 99 inclusive. You should count how many of times each number is generated and write these counts out to the screen.

Pane and Myers conducted studies asking non-programming fifth-grade users to write descriptions of a Pac-Mac game (in another study, college students were given a spreadsheet programming task). The participants also drew sketches of the game so they could make deictic references. Pane and Myers then analyzed the descriptions to discover ...

This paper describes the design and implementation of "langutils," a high-performance natural language toolkit for Common Lisp. We introduce the techniques of real-world NLP and explore tradeoffs in the representation and implementation of tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, and parsing. The paper concludes with a discussion of the use of the toolkit ...

Perhaps one reason for the absence of explicit looping in natural language is that there already exists basic linguistic constructions that imply a class of procedure which reasons about sets using relational descriptions (e.g. "sweet drinks" as a subset of "drinks"); these set-theoretic constructions seem to supplant the need to ...

As a person types a story into Metafor, the system continuously updates a side-by-side "visualization" of the person"s narrative as scaffolding code. This code may not be directly executable, but it is meant to help a person reify her thoughts. We believe that Metafor is a novel system which can ...

Natural language is also generic enough to use the same syntax to declare and compute variables, a manner similar to generic functions of the Common LISP Object System (e.g. "Pacman eats yellow dots" can depending on what"s known, declare that dots are yellow, or apply "eat" only to the subset ...

No coherent meaning without simulation. In the Bubble Lexicon graph, different and possibly conflicting meanings can attach to each word-concept node; therefore, words hardly have any coherent meaning in the static view. We suggest that when human minds think about what a word or phrase means, meaning is always evaluated ...

ConceptNet is a freely available commonsense knowledge base and natural-language-processing tool-kit which supports many practical textual-reasoning tasks over real-world documents including topic-gisting, analogy-making, and other context oriented inferences. The knowledge base is a semantic network presently consisting of over 1.6 million assertions of commonsense knowledge encompassing the spatial, physical, social, ...

For example, what is the precise color of a "red apple?" In logic, we might be able to formally represent the range in the color spectrum corresponding to a "red apple," but in natural language, the word "red" is imprecise and has various interpretations. Consider the differing colors which map ...

Things fall down, not up. Weddings (sometimes) have a bride and a groom. If someone yells at you, they"re probably angry. One of the reasons that computers seem dumber than humans is that they don"t have common sense--a myriad of simple facts about everyday life and the ability to make ...

We were interested in the question of whether it was possible to distribute the problem of building a commonsense knowledge base across thousands of people on the Web, and especially, people with little or no special training in computer science or artificial intelligence. We were interested in whether the "average ...

Asociacion Espanola de Inteligencia Artificial "Best AI Paper Award" Recipient. One novice user submitted the query: "I want to find other people who like movies," and obtained many irrelevant and unwanted search results on the topic of movies. In contrast, a more experienced user formed the query: " +"my homepage" ...

We investigated three broad properties of intelligent software agents -- communication through and understanding human language; exercising some commonsense to prevent obvious mistakes; and learning from past user interactions to improve future interactions. The ARIA Photo Agent provided an application platform from which approaches to these properties were tested, and ...

Makebelieve, an interactive story generation agent that can generate short fictional texts of 5 to 20 lines when the user supplies the first line of the story. Our fail-soft approach to story generation represents a hybrid approach inheriting from both the structuralist and transformationalist traditions. It also incorporates a novel ...

In our photo domain, we propose a mechanism for robust retrieval by expanding the concepts depicted in the photos, thus going beyond lexical-based expansion. Because photos often depict places, situations and events in everyday life, concepts depicted in photos such as place, event, and activity can be expanded based on ...

In user testing, we saw not only that ARIA adapts to the user, but that the user adapts to ARIA. Often a user's typing will bring up some photos relevant to the user's current text, but that also trigger the user's memory, encouraging him or her to explain related pictures ...