In this work we focus on classroom discourse. Specifically, we describe an approach to modeling and tracking the classroom verbal interaction between teacher and students. We assume that the evolution of the classroom discourse takes place in a space whose dimensions correspond to specific discourse categories and thus the rate of occurrence of these events can be monitored, categorized and tra...

The paper addresses the relation between several dimensions along which discourse has been assumed to be structured – topical structure, hierarchical structure, QUD-structure and thematic structure – and points at previously undescribed mismatches between those. BACKGROUND ASSUMPTIONS: As discourse progresses, the aboutness topic of a sentence (Reinhart, 1981; Roberts, 2011; Krifka, 2007) may r...

We describe the generation of communicative actions in an implemented embodied conversational agent. Our agent plans each utterance so that multiple communicative goals may be realized opportunistically by a composite action including not only speech but also coverbal gesture that fits the context and the ongoing speech in ways representative of natural human conversation. We accomplish this by...

The present research examines the ambivalence of achievement goal promotion at university, and more specifically in the psychology curriculum. On the one hand, psychology teachers explicitly encourage mastery but not performance (neither approach nor avoidance) goals. On the other hand, the selection process encourages the endorsement of not only mastery but also performance-approach goals. In ...

In naturally occurring discourse, much that is meant to be communicated is left out of the explicit text. The interpreter must reconstruct much of the intended meaning ; and the generator can leave out information that will be reconstructed. In this paper, we use an abductive approach to generation and interpretation to provide an account of how the generative and interpretive processes can be ...

User interfaces have emerged from command lines to direct manipulation and now faces a new generation. From the user’s point of view, intelligent interfaces should provide adaptivity, context sensitivity and more assistance with the task at hand. To achieve these goals, the system needs to understand multimodal and possibly imprecise input, generate coordinated multimodal presentations and mana...

This work proposes a trainable system for summarizing news and obtaining an approximate argumentative structure of the source text. To achieve these goals we use several techniques and heuristics, such as detecting the main concepts in the text, connectivity between sentences, occurrence of proper nouns, anaphors, discourse markers and a binary-tree representation (due to the use of an agglomer...

A mathematical abstraction is applied to model intelligence from the bottom up. Starting from an abstraction of a basic embodied match between sensations and reactions, the modelling process then integrates a relatively small number of modular building blocks to scale along a continuum from lowto general high-level intelligence. The distal goals are manageable implementations, a theoretical sta...

Moore and Pollack have recently given an analysis of R.ST relations in tel'mS of in tent ional versus in format ional levels of discourse [5]. Accol'ding to their (convincing) analysis, presentational RST relations correspond to the intentional level of discourse and subject matter relations to the inlbrmational level. For each text there shouhl exist two RST analyses: one containing only prese...

In this paper, we provide a linguistic analysis and an implementation of the discourse structure of safety requirements within the framework of the discourse semantics platform. The main structures are introduced and a detailed evaluation is carried out. Understanding the contents of requirements is a major objective to be able to automatically organize them, develop traceability, ex...