A fundamental problem in text data mining is to extract meaningful structure from document streams that arrive continuously over time. E-mail and news articles are two natural examples of such streams, each characterized by topics that appear, grow in intensity for a period of time, and then fade away. The published literature in a particular research field can be seen to exhibit similar phenomena over a much longer time scale. Underlying much of the text mining work in this area is the following intuitive premise --- that the appearance of a topic in a document stream is signaled by a "burst of activity," with certain features rising sharply in frequency as the topic emerges.

Abstract. This paper describes a corpus annotation project to study issues in the manual annotation of opinions, emotions, sentiments, speculations, evaluations and other private states in language. The resulting corpus annotation scheme is described, as well as examples of its use. In addition, the manual annotation process and the results of an inter-annotator agreement study on a 10,000-sentence corpus of articles drawn from the world press are presented.

This paper presents this algorithm, gives demonstrations of an implemented system, and describes the results of some preliminary empirical studies, which lend support to the algorithm

The authors would like to thank the following people for their extensive comments,

Narrative structure models are useful tools for understand-ing how and why narratives of any medium affect an audi-ence’s level of participation in their role of story reconstruc-tion and understanding. [14] With the advent of the com-puter comes the potential to negotiate through many such models and variables within models as a means of generat-ing multiple narratives quickly and semi-autonomously. The computational narrative model presented in this paper offers one approach to narrative generation, that of splitting narrative structure; 2) defining a collection and organization of story pieces with some representation of their meaning; and 3) a navigational strategy or reasoning through that col-lection of story pieces. Agent Stories is a story design and presentation environment for non-linear, multiple-point-of-view cinematic stories. It is designed to be placed in the hands of the non-linear story writer to use as a tool to pro-mote structuring and re-writing of non-linear narratives be-fore and as they are realized in audio and video.

Increasingly heritage institutions are making digital artifacts available to the general public and research groups to promote the active exploration of heritage and encourage visits to heritage sites. Stories, such as folklore and first person accounts form a useful and engaging heritage resource for this purpose. Story Fountain provides intelligent support for the exploration of digital stories. The suite of functions provided in Story Fountain together support the investigation of questions and topics that require the accumulation, association or induction of information across the story archive. Story Fountain provides specific support toward this end such as for comparing and contrasting story concepts, the presentation of story paths between concepts, and mapping stories and events according to properties such as who met whom and who lived where.

This paper aims at reviewing narrative approaches and theories in an effort to assess their potential as suitable models for computational implementation within the EU Framework V-funded project VICTEC (Virtual ICT with Empathic Characters). We discuss classical narrative theories as well as envisage alternative interactive models according to the narrative requirements presented by VICTEC. The Emergent Narrative (Aylett, 1999) concept is also defined and referred as an essential element of the VICTEC research project.

Abstract. Visiting museums is an increasingly popular pastime. Studies have shown that visitors can draw on their museum experience, long after their visit, to learn new things in practical situations. Rather than viewing a visit as a single learning event, we are interested in ways of extending the experience to allow visitors to access online resources tailored to their interests. Museums typically have extensive archives that can be made available online, the challenge is to match these resources to the visitor’s interests and present them in a manner that facilitates exploration and engages the visitor. We propose the use of knowledge level resource descriptions to identify relevant resources and create structured presentations. A system that embodies this approach, which is in use in a UK museum, is presented and the applicability of the approach to the broader semantic web is discussed. 1.

The propositional content of a reference is the proposition attributing to the referent the properties that correspond to the nouns and modifiers in the reference (for example, the propositional content of `Mary' is that the referent is named `Mary'). During language comprehension, the hearer or reader must determine the set of beliefs with respect to which the propositional content of a reference is to be understood. In the prototypical case, this set consists of the propositions that she believes that the speaker or writer believes that she and the speaker or writer mutually believe. This paper identifies two contexts in which the propositional content of a specific reference is not understood with respect to this set--- subjective and objective sentences in third-person fictional narrative text---and identifies some implications of this for understanding specific references in these contexts. 1 Introduction Specific references are references to particular entities, for example, `a...

In this paper, we describe an approach to audiovisual data modeling for multimedia integration and synchronization. The approach chosen consists in using description tools from Multimedia Description Schemes of standard MPEG-7 to describe audiovisual contents and in integrating these description models into a multimedia integration and synchronization model close to SMIL. The resulting model provides relevant specification tools for the fine integration of multimedia fragments into multimedia presentations. An authoring environment illustrates the authoring features that can be obtained thanks to these integrated models.