A fundamental requirement for scientific treatment of board games is a simple and practical numbering of the map locations. With square grids, an obvious solution is coordinates along two orthogonal axes. Hexagonal grids, however, have three axes, and only one of them can be aligned with an edge of a square board. Various systems have been proposed for numbering hexagonal grids, and several remain in use. Computational tools that support games with hexagonal grids will presumably need to convert, or operate directly on, the grid coordinates. While it would be possible to write separate software for each of the different coordinate systems, a more general approach is to define a formal description of the coordinate system, which is then supplied as data, and have a single piece of software that can handle all possible hexagonal grid coordinates. Such a system is proposed here, after an exhaustive survey of the various existing coordinate systems, and a comprehensive investigation of the logical possibilities for defining a coordinate system on a hexagonal grid. The formal expression that defines any specific coordinate system consists of around ten characters in the standard 7-b ASCII alphabet, for maximum computational interoperability.

The Web is a huge virtual space where to express and share individual opinions, influencing any aspect of life, with implications for marketing and communication alike. Social Media are influencing consumersâ preferences by shaping their attitudes and behaviors. Monitoring the Social Media activities is a good way to measure customersâ loyalty, keeping a track on their sentiment towards brands or products. Social Media are the next logical marketing arena. Currently, Facebook dominates the digital marketing space, followed closely by Twitter. This paper describes a Sentiment Analysis study performed on over than 1000 Facebook posts about newscasts, comparing the sentiment for Rai - the Italian public broadcasting service - towards the emerging and more dynamic private company La7. This study maps study results with observations made by the Osservatorio di Pavia, which is an Italian institute of research specialised in media analysis at theoretical and empirical level, engaged in the analysis of political communication in the mass media. This study takes also in account the data provided by Auditel regarding newscast audience, correlating the analysis of Social Media, of Facebook in particular, with measurable data, available to public domain.

The PARC 700 dependency bank is a potentially very useful resource for parser evaluation that has, so to speak, a high barrier to entry, because of tokenisation that is quite different from the source of the data, the Penn Treebank, and because there is no representation of word order, producing an uncertainty factor of some 15%. There is also a small, but perhaps not insignificant, number of errors. When using the dependency bank for evaluation, it seems likely that these things will cause inflated counts for mismatches, so to obtain more accurate measurements, it is desirable to eliminate them. The work reported here consists of an automatic conversion of the dependency bank into a Prolog representation where the word order is explicit, as well as graphical representations of the dependency trees for all 700 sentences, automatically generated from the Prolog data. As a side effect of the transformation, errors were detected and corrected. It is hoped that this work will lead to more widespread use of the PARC 700 dependency bank for parser evaluation.

We investigate the utility of supertag information for guiding an existing dependency parser of German. Using weighted constraints to integrate the additionally available information, the decision process of the parser is influenced by changing its preferences, without excluding alternative structural interpretations from being considered. The paper reports on a series of experiments using varying models of supertags that significantly increase the parsing accuracy. In addition, an upper bound on the accuracy that can be achieved with perfect supertags is estimated.

We describe a human-robot dialogue system that allows a human to collaborate with a robot agent on assembling construction toys. The human and the robot are fully equal peers in the interaction, rather than simply partners. Joint action is supported at all stages of the interaction: the participants agree on a construction task, jointly decide how to proceed to proceed with the task, and also implement the selected plans jointly. The symmetry provides novel challenges for a dialogue system, and also makes it possible for findings from human-human joint-action dialogues to be easily implemented and tested.