Boris Yamrom

A NOVEL APPROACH FOR THE COORDINATION OF MULTI-VEHICLE TEAMS

This paper describes a novel approach for the real-time coordination of multi-vehicle teams to perform reconnaissance and surveillance missions. Our approach incorporates a powerful algorithmic framework, which we have used to develop dynamic route and sensor planning algorithms for multi-vehicle team coordination. Furthermore, this framework allows the development of a class of algorithms to match the extent of communication and coordination permissible for the particular mission. We have implemented a prototype of this framework and presented results for the case when full coordination between the teammates is allowed.

Computing Affect in Metaphors

This article describes a novel approach to automated determination of affect associated with metaphorical language. Affect in language is understood to mean the attitude toward a topic that a writer attempts to convey to the reader by using a particular metaphor. This affect, which we will classify as positive, negative or neutral with various degrees of intensity, may arise from the target of the metaphor, from the choice of words used to describe it, or from other elements in its immediate linguistic context. We attempt to capture all these contributing elements in an Affect Calculus and demonstrate experimentally that the resulting method can accurately approximate human judgment. The work reported here is part of a larger effort to develop a highly accurate system for identifying, classifying, and comparing metaphors occurring in large volumes of text across four different languages: English, Spanish, Russian, and Farsi.

Understanding Cultural Conflicts using Metaphors and Sociolinguistic Measures of Influence

In this article, we outline a novel approach to the automated analysis of cross-cultural conflicts through the discovery and classification of the metaphors used by the protagonist parties involved in the conflict. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach on a prototypical conflict surrounding the appropriate management and oversight of gun-ownership in the United States. In addition, we present a way of incorporating sociolinguistic measures of influence in discourse to draw further insights from complex data. The results presented in this article should be considered as illustrative of the types of analyses that can be obtained using our methodology; however, no attempt was made to rigorously validate the specific findings reported here. We address open issues such as how our approach could be generalized to analyze cross-cultural conflicts around the world.

Discovering Conceptual Metaphors using Source Domain Spaces

This article makes two contributions towards the use of lexical resources and corpora; specifically making use of them for gaining access to and using word associations. The direct application of our approach is for detecting linguistic and conceptual metaphors automatically in text. We describe our method of building conceptual spaces, that is, defining the vocabulary that characterizes a Source Domain (e.g., Disease) of a conceptual metaphor (e.g., Poverty is a Disease). We also describe how these conceptual spaces are used to group linguistic metaphors into conceptual metaphors. Our method works in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, Russian and Farsi. We provide details of how our method can be evaluated and evaluation results that show satisfactory performance across all languages.