Early emotional understanding is fostered by mother-child conversation in which mothers elaboratively enhance children's understanding. Little is known of the broader relational and risk factors influencing maternal discourse style, how discourse content and quality are associated with children's emotion language, and how these predict emotion understanding. In this longitudinal study of a high...

This article examines the effects of age, cognition, and discourse skills on the clinical manifestations of formal thought disorder in 31 children with schizophrenia, 14 with schizotypal personality disorder (SPD), and 70 who were normal. The communication deficits of the 31 children with schizophrenia have three characteristics: illogical thinking, loose associations, and impaired discourse sk...

In this article, we explore the potential of using sentence-level discourse structure for machine translation evaluation. We first design discourse-aware similarity measures, which use allsubtree kernels to compare discourse parse trees in accordance with the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Then, we show that a simple linear combination with these measures can help improve various existing m...

Conventional confidence measures for assessing the reliability of ASR output are typically derived from “low-level” information which is obtained during speech recognition decoding. In contract to these approaches, we propose a novel utterance verification scheme which incorporates confidence measures derived from “high-level” knowledge sources. Specifically, we investigate two measures: in-dom...

Criterion Online Essay Evaluation Service includes a capability that labels sentences in student writing with essay-based discourse elements (e.g., thesis statements). We describe a new system that enhances Criterion’s capability, by evaluating multiple aspects of coherence in essays. This system identifies features of sentences based on semantic similarity measures and discourse structure. A s...

We present in this paper, the application of a novel approach to computational modeling, understanding and detection of social phenomena in online multi-party discourse. A two-tiered approach was developed to detect a collection of social phenomena deployed by participants, such as topic control, task control, disagreement and involvement. We discuss how the mid-level social phenomena can be re...

The goal of this paper is to lay a logical foundation for discourse theories by providing an algebraic foundation of compositional formalisms for discourse semantics as an analogon to the simply typed-calculus. Just as that can be specialized to type theory by simply providing a special type for truth values and postulating the quantiiers and connectives as constants with xed semantics, the pro...

We present in this paper, the application of a novel approach to computational modeling, understanding and detection of social phenomena in online multi-party discourse. A two-tiered approach was developed to detect a collection of social phenomena deployed by participants, such as topic control, task control, disagreement and involvement. We discuss how the mid-level social phenomena can be re...