Emotional characters for automatic plot creation

The Virtual Storyteller is a multi-agent framework for automatic story generation. In this paper we describe how plots emerge from the actions of semi-autonomous character agents, focusing on the influence of the characters’ emotions on plot development

Coping with cancer:The perspective of patients' relatives

Cancer affects not only patients but also their loved ones. Material and methods. This paper presents a selective, narrative review of psychosocial consequences of cancer and its treatment for relatives of patients, including parents and siblings of children with cancer, children of parents with cancer and partners of adults with cancer. Results. Remarkably, most relatives adapt well to the cancer of a loved one. That is only a minority appears to be at risk for psychological morbidity. Bereavement has been found to impact psychological well being in the short-term, but it does also not appear to be a major risk factor for severe psychopathology. The exception being the loss of a child; this often appears to have intense and long-lasting effects on the parents. Furthermore, especially women were found to be at risk for distress. Conclusion. Future studies that focus on the interactions between patients and family members - parents, children and partners - are of great importance to further the field by providing more insight into the family dynamics of dealing with cancer. Such insights will offer tools for (refining) interventions for families in need

Recargo por compras con tarjetas de crédito en el exterior

Este trabajo estudia la poca claridad con que se gestiona una retención de impuesto sobre las compras con tarjeta en el exterior, su posibilidad de deducirla y la problemática que se le genera a los sujetos que no son pasivos de los impuestos.Fil: Alderisi, Marianela. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas.Fil: Mata, Fernanda Mariet. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas.Fil: Ruiz, Débora Natalia. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas

Generating expressive speech for storytelling applications

Work on expressive speech synthesis has long focused on the expression of basic emotions. In recent years, however, interest in other expressive styles has been increasing. The research presented in this paper aims at the generation of a storytelling speaking style, which is suitable for storytelling applications and more in general, for applications aimed at children. Based on an analysis of human storytellers' speech, we designed and implemented a set of prosodic rules for converting "neutral" speech, as produced by a text-to-speech system, into storytelling speech. An evaluation of our storytelling speech generation system showed encouraging results