Inspired by Fairclough's suggestion of the idea of commodification in higher education, particularly in terms of "the marketization of the discursive practices of universities" (1993, p. 143), the author of the present paper proposes a theoretical basis within which the constitutive functioning of academic discourse in the mentioned process can be understood.  In this attempt, Althusser's chain...

We describe a model for resolution of belief conflicts by argumentation in agent interactions, based on aspects of dialogic logic, speech act theory and belief systems research. This is part of a long term project on the relations between argumentation and cognitive change in collaborative problemsolving interactions. A set of communicative acts for argumentative interaction is defined, based o...

Awareness is defined as the perception of the activities being carried out by members of a team in a given context. The use of awareness support techniques reduces the effort needed to realize communicative and collaborative tasks. Therefore, this leads to an increase in group work productivity. In this article we propose a conceptual framework which improves upon the process of building intera...

When established communication systems cannot be used, people rapidly create novel systems to modify the mental state of another agent according to their intentions. However, there are dramatic inter-individual differences in the implementation of this human competence for communicative innovation. Here we characterize psychological sources of inter-individual variability in the ability to buil...

This study is a preliminary report on an experiment relating PhonePass SET-10 scores to the scale of level descriptors in the Council of Europe Framework. This scale describes the content and level of second language proficiency from a functional communicative perspective. Speech samples from 121 non-native speakers of English were: (1) scored in SET-10, the automatic test of spoken English, an...

Research in virtual agents has largely ignored the role and behavior of side participants and especially bystanders. Our view is that the behavior of these other participants is critical in multi-party interactions, especially in interactive drama. In this paper, we provide an analysis of nonverbal behaviors associated with these roles. We first review studies of interpersonal relationships and...

BACKGROUND communicative functions used by language therapists and patients. AIM to analyze the communicative functions used by language therapists and patients of the autistic spectrum. METHOD the communicative functions expressed by six therapists in interaction with six patients each were analyzed, constituting 36 profiles of communicative functions expressed by the dyad therapist-patien...

We present a framework for handling emotional variations in a speech-based natural language generation system for use in the MRE virtual training environment. The system is a first step toward addressing issues in emotion-based modeling of verbal communicative behavior. We cast the problem of emotion-based generation as a distance minimization task, in which the system chooses between multiple ...

Social navigation is the process of making navigational decisions in real or virtual environments based on social and communicative interaction with others. A computational model for social navigation is presented as an extension to an existing framework for general navigation, reducing decision-making to the minimization of cognitive costs. Consideration for social navigation gives rise to a c...

Due to the significance of multiculturalism in politics, and the central role linguistic devices play in organizing the political discourse, this text-based qualitative study was carried out to compare political interviews in the Iranian and English contexts to find out the probable similarities and differences in the use of discourse markers (DMs) between the two cultures. To this end, three s...