It has been suggested that a referent’s accessibility is affected by the degree to which it is in the speaker’s attention. Assuming that less accessible referents are less likely to be pronominalized, this predicts that speakers under cognitive load use more elaborate referring expressions. However, speakers under load may also have difficulty taking into account their addressee’s perspective, ...

This study examined the effect of the ZPD-based discourse scaffolding on EFL learners' co-construction of L2 metadiscourse performing collaborative writing tasks and explored the discourse scaffolding dynamics. The participants were 160 EFL students that were assigned to four different treatment conditions: (i) formal teaching, (ii) input enhancement, (iii) non-ZPD interaction, and (iv) ZPD-bas...

The notion of conceptual structure in CA rules that perform the density classification task (DCT) was introduced by [1]. Here we investigate the role of process-symmetry in CAs that solve the DCT, in particular the idea of conceptual similarity, which defines a novel search space for CA rules. We report on two new process-symmetric onedimensional rules for the DCT which have the highest “balanc...

This paper presents an empirical comparison of several shape representations in order to search a database of training examples (silhouettes) for the task of human pose estimation. In particular, we compare the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Lipschitz embeddings and the Histogram of Shape Contexts that has previously demonstrated some success in this task. Our results suggest that a simple li...

There is much interest in using large corpora to explore predictors of the probability of higher level linguistic structures, but suitable corpora are not available for all languages and their varieties. We explore a task that uses discourse contexts from an existing corpus as prompts for sentence completion to investigate the usefulness of the method for generating data as a proxy for unavaila...

The present study examines the realization of complaints by Cameroonian French speakers. data were collected, means discourse completion tasks (DCT) that was administered to 228 participants in Yaoundé and Douala, Cameroon. examples analyzed according following aspects: head act strategies (direct indirect complaints) external modifiers. With respect strategies, results show informants mostly p...

The purpose of this study was to compare apology strategies used by Iranian EFL learner students and native English speaking students (NSS) in formal and informal situations. The aim was further to investigate gender differentiation among participants. For this purpose, data were elicited from 40 Iranian (16 males and 24 females) and 40 native English speaking students (20 males and 20 females)...

Without discourse connectives, classifying implicit discourse relations is a challenging task and a bottleneck for building a practical discourse parser. Previous research usually makes use of one kind of discourse framework such as PDTB or RST to improve the classification performance on discourse relations. Actually, under different discourse annotation frameworks, there exist multiple corpor...