Recent work on the application of relevance theory to humorous speech-acts (jokes) defines these as being characterised by an increased demand in processing effort for the attainment of maximum contextual effects. This increase, however, is limited to the resolution of…

Web-based learning environments are becoming increasingly popular in higher education. One of the most important web-learning resources is the virtual laboratory (VL), which gives students an easy way for training and learning through the Internet. Moreover, on-line collaborative communication represents…

In the UK, a series of policies and practices since
the 1980s have increasingly involved service users
and carers in the policy and planning of mainstream
services (Department of Health, 2000; 2001; 2004).
The knowledge base on which services are…

This paper discusses questions about communication of probabilistic knowledge in the light of current theories of agent communication. It will argue that there is a semantic gap between these theories and research areas related to probabilistic knowledge representation and communication,…

Performance of parallel programs is one of the reasons of their development. The process of designing and programming a parallel application is a very hard task that requires the necessary knowledge for the detection of performance bottlenecks, and the corresponding…

This paper deals with lifelong learning. Based on a three-year case study it provides evidence of innovations in this area. The paper aims to add to the body of work in blended learning by providing evidence of knowledge, persuasion, decision,…

This paper presents a group of elements to improve the teaching and learning in technological education, applied to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). These elements are based on some contributions issued from contemporary education models, namely, the thematic approach, meaningful…

In the software world portability means power. The more operating environments you can support out of the same code tree means more potential users for your software. If done right, additional platforms can be supported with little extra maintenance cost.…

Document classification has already been widely studied. In fact, some studies compared feature selection techniques or feature space transformation whereas some others compared the performance of different algorithms. Recently, following the rising interest towards the Support Vector Machine, various studies…

This paper describes an information retrieval system called NLA which analyses natural language queries. The languages used here are: English, Italian & French. The query analysis is performed in two stages: the comprehension stage, where the user's request is translated…