Chrysanne Dimarco | University of Waterloo, Canada (original) (raw)

Papers by Chrysanne Dimarco

Persuasive technology can have a significant effect on people's health. The sleep coach appl... more Persuasive technology can have a significant effect on people's health. The sleep coach application is a persuasive technology that raises student's awareness and attitudes towards getting a full night's sleep (6-9 hours) to be more positive. Students using the application ...

… of BioLink 2004 Workshop on Linking …, 2004

Literature indexing tools provide re-searchers with a means to navigate through the network of sc... more Literature indexing tools provide re-searchers with a means to navigate through the network of scholarly scientific articles in a subject domain. We propose that more effective indexing tools may be designed using the links between articles provided by citations. With the ...

Journal of Argumentation in Context, Dec 31, 2014

Argument & Computation, Sep 2, 2015

The paper reports on the results of an exploratory study into the topical organisation and stylis... more The paper reports on the results of an exploratory study into the topical organisation and stylistic features of argumentation in a corpus of ophthalmic clinical research papers. The study responds to the need for systematised and generalisable argumentation models in knowledgeintensive fields. We present here a schematised superstructure of the arguments from the corpus, charting the configurations of stylistic features, which signal the elements of this superstructure, epistemic topoi. We pay special attention to the role of lexical categories (or semantic fields) in the configurations, to the relations between the fields, and to their interactions with other elements of the configurations, including semantic, grammatical, syntagmatic, deictic, and coreferential features. Epistemic topoi are a promising discourse constituent in argumentation because, as we found, they are distinct from syntagmatic units, such as phrases, clauses, or argumentative zones, and because they are signalled with substantially distinctive stylistic features despite having no fixed order in the superstructure. They hold considerable promise for computational argumentation analysis and processing, perhaps especially in scientific and technical discourses, where the need for reliable detection and summarisation is particularly high. Our investigation shows that despite the complex and interpenetrating semantic and stylistic attributes of argumentation, there are significant, computationally tractable regularities.

Abstract Our paper describes the Rhetorical Figure Ontology Project, a multidisciplinary research... more Abstract Our paper describes the Rhetorical Figure Ontology Project, a multidisciplinary research project that is presently working towards the development of a comprehensive database of rhetorical figures, an associated wiki, and, ultimately, an ontology of rhetorical figures. The database and wiki project provide the dataset and space for the conceptual development, respectively, to create an ontology. We define an ontology as a formalized taxonomy or system of classification of concepts and associated descriptions of said ...

We report on an ongoing research project that uses OWL and a corpus of figurative instances to ex... more We report on an ongoing research project that uses OWL and a corpus of figurative instances to explore the cognitive dimensions of rhetorical figures. We argue that figures beyond familiar tropes like metaphor and metonymy are deeply cognitive. We adopt the position that figures are form/function pairings which make them especially promising for Advanced NLP, taking one figure as exemplary, the reverse-repetition scheme, antimetabole (e.g., “All for one and one for all”). We illustrate three different methodologies for building ontologies—top down, middle out, and bottom up. And we demonstrate the fruitfulness of cognitive ontological modelling by the way it reveals new categorical arrangements, new conceptual relationships, and important but hitherto unsuspected properties of figures, their multiplicity (figures working together) and their multiplexity (figures having multiple types of instantiations).

SPLAT (Sentence Plan Language Authoring Tool) is an authoring tool intended to facilitate the cre... more SPLAT (Sentence Plan Language Authoring Tool) is an authoring tool intended to facilitate the creation of sentence-plan specifications for the Penman natural language generation system. SPLAT uses an examplebased approach in the form of sentence.plan templates to aid the user in creating and maintaining sentence plans. SPLAT also contains a sentence bank, a user-extensible collection of sentence plans annotated in various ways. The sentence bank can be searched for candidate plans that can then be used in the creation of new sentence plans specific to the domain of interest. SPLAT's graphical environment provides additional support to the user in the form of menu-driven access to Penman's linguistic resources and management of partially built sentence plans. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n As natural language generation systems become more complex and sophisticated, the mode of input to these systems is becoming correspondingly more difficult to specify and manage. Currently, sent...

Computational Linguistics, 1989

We describe here a new graduate course that introduces Computer Science M.Sc. and Ph.D. students ... more We describe here a new graduate course that introduces Computer Science M.Sc. and Ph.D. students to research in Health Informatics.

Proceedings of the 15th conference on Computational linguistics -, 1994

Workshops at the Twenty-Fifth AAAI Conference …, 2011

AAAI Publications, Workshops at the Twenty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. ...

... Computational stylistics for natural language translation. Authors: Chrysanne Di Marco, Super... more ... Computational stylistics for natural language translation. Authors: Chrysanne Di Marco, Supervisors: G. Hirst, Publication: · Doctoral Dissertation, Computational stylistics for natural language translation. ©1990. 1990 Doctoral Dissertation. Bibliometrics. ...

… on personalisation in e …, 2005

In reconstructive surgery, multiple interventions during one surgical episode are com-mon. Each i... more In reconstructive surgery, multiple interventions during one surgical episode are com-mon. Each intervention must be explained, its intended and potential consequences ar-ticulated, and informed consent of the patient secured. Although the pre-surgical en-counter between the patient ...

Proceedings, Sixth Annual Symposium on Computers in Medical Care, Nov 1, 1982

There is an intrinsic simplicity and similarity in clinical trials, despite their apparent overwh... more There is an intrinsic simplicity and similarity in clinical trials, despite their apparent overwhelming variety. Their basic processes, in investigating the cause and effect relationship between some intervention and its outcome, are the same. They also share common problems. Through the enforcement of the proper procedures we can ensure the quality of the clinical experiment. The expense and commitment of time and resources to the carrying out of clinical trials demands attention to these matters... if for no other reasons ...

AAAI Spring Symposium on Building Lexicons for Machine Translation, Mar 1, 1993

If we want to describe the action of someone who is looking out a window for an extended time, ho... more If we want to describe the action of someone who is looking out a window for an extended time, how do we choose between the words gazing, staring, and peering? What exactly is the difference between an argument, a dispute, and a row? In this paper, we describe our research in progress on the problem of lexical choice and the representations of world knowledge and of lexical structure and meaning that the task requires. In particular, we wish to deal with nuances and subtleties of denotation and connotation--shades of meaning ...

The Information Retrieval Series, 2006

Citations in scientific writing fulfil an important role in creating relationships among mutually... more Citations in scientific writing fulfil an important role in creating relationships among mutually relevant articles within a research field. These inter-article relationships reinforce the argumentation structure intrinsic to all scientific writing. Therefore, determining the nature of the exact relationship between a citing and cited paper requires an understanding of the rhetorical relations within the argumentative context in which a citation is placed. To determine these relations automatically, we have suggested that various stylistic and rhetorical cues will be significant. One such cue that we are studying is the use of hedging to modify the affect of a scientific claim. We provide evidence that hedging occurs more frequently in citation contexts than in the text as a whole. With this information we conjecture that hedging is a significant aspect of the rhetorical structure of citation contexts and that the pragmatics of hedges may help in determining the rhetorical purpose of citations. A citation indexing tool for biomedical literature analysis is introduced.

AMIA Annual …, 2006

Although the pre-surgical patient-surgeon encounter is the opportunity to educate the patient, it... more Although the pre-surgical patient-surgeon encounter is the opportunity to educate the patient, it is essential that the patient be given educational materials to complement the face-to-face exchange. This is virtually impossible to do well with brochures, because ...