18081961
Designing our town: MOOsburg
MOOsburg is a community-oriented multi-user domain. It was created to enrich the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV) by providing real-time, situated interaction and a place-based model for community information. Three versions of MOOsburg have been developed: a classic text-based MOO, a MOO extended to drive a Web-browser, and a Java-based system. The most recent version of MOOsburg is fundamentally different from classic MOOs, supporting distributed system development and management and a direct manipulation approach to navigation. We are currently developing a variety of community-oriented applications, including a virtual science fair and a dispersed natural history museum.
15595014
Notification and awareness: synchronizing task-oriented collaborative activity
People working collaboratively must establish and maintain awareness of one another's intentions, actions and results. Notification systems typically support awareness of the presence, tasks and actions of collaborators, but they do not adequately support awareness of persistent and complex activities. We analysed awareness breakdowns in use of our Virtual School system--stemming from problems related to the collaborative situation, group, task and tool support--to motivate the concept of activity awareness. Activity awareness builds on prior conceptions of social and action awareness, but emphasizes the importance of activity context factors like planning and coordination. This work suggests design strategies for notification systems to better support collaborative activity.
148806746
Human-computer interaction: psychology as a science of design.
7723669
Better home shopping or new democracy?: evaluating community network outcomes
This is a perspective paper on community networks - socio-technical infrastructures supporting villages, towns, and neighborhoods. Community networking is well-established, world wide, and addresses critical societal issues, such as the “crisis of community” and the sociality of the Internet. However, community network projects have not emphasized evaluation. Relatively little is known about the economic, social, and psychological consequences of community networks for the individuals, groups, and communities served. Evaluating community networks is a momentous mutual opportunity for the development of CHI evaluation methodologies and for bringing technical CHI expertise to bear on societal issues.
2269827
Training wheels in a user interface
New users of high-function application systems can become frustrated and confused by the errors they make in the early stages of learning. A training interface for a commercial word processor was designed to make typical and troublesome error states “unreachable,” thus eliminating the sources of some new-user learning problems. Creating a training environment from the basic function of the system itself afforded substantially faster learning coupled with better learning achievement and better performance on a comprehension post-test. A control group spent almost a quarter of their time recovering from the error states that the training interface blocked off. We speculate on how this training strategy might be refined, and more generally, on how function should be organized in a user interface.
9978523
Community collective efficacy: structure and consequences of perceived capacities in the Blacksburg Electronic Village
Bandura's social cognitive construct "perceived self-efficacy" has been used widely to understand individual behavior as a function of domain-specific beliefs about personal capacities. Collective efficacy is the extension of the self-efficacy construct to organizations and groups; it refers to beliefs about collective capacities in specific domains. Our research is investigating the use of collective efficacy in understanding attitudes and behaviors of members of proximal residential communities with respect to issues like attachment, engagement, and sociality, specifically as modulated by use of the Internet and community networks. This paper describes our analysis of the structure and external validity of the collective efficacy construct.
14571844
The process of ISD methodology selection and use: a case study
This paper provides empirically-based explanations for the observed low, and partial, use of information systems development (ISD) methodologies. The research reported in this paper examines the process of methodology selection and use in an intensive field study of the early stages of systems development and notes ongoing adaptation of methodologies in response to changing contingencies. The paper concludes that, in many circumstances, methodology adaptation is a necessary part of successful systems development. It also suggests that deeper understanding of the attitudes of different stakeholders to selecting and using ISD methodologies may help to explain this adaptation.
16737045
Domain-Specific Sense Distributions and Predominant Sense Acquisition
Distributions of the senses of words are often highly skewed. This fact is exploited by word sense disambiguation (WSD) systems which back off to the predominant sense of a word when contextual clues are not strong enough. The domain of a document has a strong influence on the sense distribution of words, but it is not feasible to produce large manually annotated corpora for every domain of interest. In this paper we describe the construction of three sense annotated corpora in different domains for a sample of English words. We apply an existing method for acquiring predominant sense information automatically from raw text, and for our sample demonstrate that (1) acquiring such information automatically from a mixed-domain corpus is more accurate than deriving it from SemCor, and (2) acquiring it automatically from text in the same domain as the target domain performs best by a large margin. We also show that for an all words WSD task this automatic method is best focussed on words that are salient to the domain, and on words with a different acquired predominant sense in that domain compared to that acquired from a balanced corpus.
14287805
A Formalism and Environment for the Development of a Large Grammar of English
Natural language grammars with large coverage are typically the result of many person-years of effort, working with clumsy formalisms and sub-optimal software support for grammar development. This paper describes our approach to the task of writing a substantial grammar, as part of a collaboration to produce a general purpose morphological and syntactic analyser for English. The grammatical formalism we have developed for the task is a metagrammatical notation which is a more expressive and computationally tractable variant of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar. We have also implemented a software system which provides a highly integrated and very powerful set of tools for developing and managing a large grammar based on this notation. The system provides a grammarian with an environment which we have found to be essential for rapid but successful production of a substantial grammar.
5587138
Automatic Extraction of Subcategorization from Corpora
We describe a novel technique and implemented system for constructing a subcategorization dictionary from textual corpora. Each dictionary entry encodes the relative frequency of occurrence of a comprehensive set of subcategorization classes for English. An initial experiment, on a sample of 14 verbs which exhibit multiple complementation patterns, demonstrates that the technique achieves accuracy comparable to previous approaches, which are all limited to a highly restricted set of subcategorization classes. We also demonstrate that a subcategorization dictionary built with the system improves the accuracy of a parser by an appreciable amount1.
7294316
The Second Release of the RASP System
We describe the new release of the RASP (robust accurate statistical parsing) system, designed for syntactic annotation of free text. The new version includes a revised and more semantically-motivated output representation, an enhanced grammar and part-of-speech tagger lexicon, and a more flexible and semi-supervised training method for the structural parse ranking model. We evaluate the released version on the WSJ using a relational evaluation scheme, and describe how the new release allows users to enhance performance using (in-domain) lexical information.