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<Paper uid="W06-3410">
  <Title>RETROSPECTIVE ANALYSIS OF COMUNICATION EVENTS - Understanding the Dynamics of Collaborative Multi-Party Discourse.</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="62" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Communication is the heart of what makes us social creatures. Today, we have a myriad of technologies that allow us to communicate in ways our forefathers could never have imagined. Computationally suported modalities such as email and instant messaging have had immeasurable effect on the way we work, play and generally interact with those in our lives. Being able to understand how individuals communicate, the methods they use, their personal preferences etc., and are all part of a field called anthroposemiotics  . This field loks to uncover the mystery behind how we communicate with ourselves (intrapersonal communication), with others (interpersonal communication), within groups (group dynamics) and acros cultures (cros-cultural communication). While there is a great deal of literature in these fields, there are few operational applications that allow for true hands-on investigation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Perhaps nowhere is the application of this field more important than in the field of intelligence analysis. Intelligence analysts must make sound judgments, coherently constructed from scattered heterogeneous fragments of information while being faced with significant time constraints. The information they use is rarely complete, often unreliable and usually temporally and spatially diverse. These dimensions need to be aligned and the information understod to enable the analyst to recognize sequences of inter-related events and hypothesize about future actions.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Our aim has been to aid the analyst by researching, designing and implementing a test-bed for the investigation of colaborative, multi-party discourse. The focus is on reducing the complexity of analyzing communications data through a triage process; from a large corpus to a small handful of relevant conversations to finally a highly detailed view of one or two conversations, with incorporated socio-behavioral dimensions. Below we present our design methodology and discus the latest version of the prototype.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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