The interaction of generic structure and interpersonal relations in two-party e-chat discourse

On the basis of a corpus of e-chat IRC exchanges (approximately 10,000 words in total) between Greek- and English-speaking speakers, the paper establishes a typical generic structure for two-party IRC exchanges, by focusing on how participants are oriented towards an ideal schema of phases and acts, as well as on how their interpersonal concerns contribute to the shaping of this schema. It is found that IRC interlocutors are primarily concerned with establishing contact with each other, while the (ideational) development of topic seems to be a less pressing need. The signaling of interpersonal relations is pervasive throughout e-chat discourse, as seen both in the range of devices developed and the two free elements of the generic schema, that is conversation play and channel check. It is also found that the accomplishment of the generic schema in each IRC exchange crucially depends on the acts of negotiation performed by the initiator and the responder.

An Architecture for End-User TV Content Enrichment

This paper proposes an extension to the televisionwatching paradigm that permits an end-user to enrich broadcast content. Examples of this enriched content are: virtual edits that allow the order of presentation within the content to be changed or that allow the content to be subsetted; conditional text, graphic or video objects that can be placed to appear within content and triggered by viewer interaction; additional navigation links that can be added to structure how other users view the base content object. The enriched content can be viewed directly within the context of the TV viewing experience. It may also be shared with other users within a distributed peer group. Our architecture is based on a model that allows the original content to remain unaltered, and which respects DRM restrictions on content reuse. The fundamental approach we use is to define an intermediate content enhancement layer that is based on the W3C’s SMIL language. Using a pen-based enhancement interface, end-users can manipulate content that is saved in a home PDR setting. This paper describes our architecture and it provides several examples of how our system handles content enhancement. We also describe a reference implementation for creating and viewing enhancements.