Collaborative writing is the process by which more than one author contributes to the content of a document. Although, multi-synchronous collaboration is very efficient in reducing task completion time, it is well known for producing documents of poor-quality content. Most existing collaborative writing environments do not really check the logical arrangement of documents portions (i.e. sentenc...

The study of argumentation has undergone periods of decadence alternate with periods of renaissance. Currently, we are witnessing one of the latter, as proved by research flowering in many issues and aspects, both in Philosophy and in Artificial Intelligence. The work presented in this thesis is concerned in particular with “rhetorical argumentation”, which on the other hand has enjoyed conside...

Then he went about his regular, non-Twitter affairs. The next afternoon, fresh from a nap, he checked his account, stared at the outcome, and tweeted to @upulieto, an associate, “I just woke up. What a mess” [49]. His tweet had spiraled virally: tens of thousands of likes, retweets, endless streams of commentary. Why? Well, lots of factors, of course. There is rarely a single factor to which on...

After 15 years, environmental researcher Kenneth Reckhow can still feel the sting of rejection. As a young scientist appearing before an Environmental Protection Agency review panel, Reckhow was eager to discuss his idea for using an unorthodox statistical approach in a water-quality study. But before he could say a word, an influential member of the panel unleashed a rhetorical attack that sto...

In this paper we describe an application model for a collaborative narrative in a multimodal tangible user interface. We investigate how a story can be developed in negotiation between three users. By collaborating the users create a soundtrack and negotiate the next video sequence. We developed rhetorical principles for editing moving image material for a node based interactive system. We pres...

The research presented in this paper is aimed at improving the stylistic quality of the texts generated by the PRINCE system, a natural language generation application designed for building texts for simple fairy tales. This is done by exploiting the potential of a lexical resource such as WordNet and structure mapping algorithms to enhance the output texts with simple rhetorical tropes such as...

Researchers in discourse have long hypothesized that the nuclei of a rhetorical structure tree provide a good summary of the text for which that tree was built. In this paper, I discuss a psychohnguistic experiment that validates this hypothesis, but that also shows that the distinction between nuclei and satelhtes is not sufficient if we want to build summaries of very high quality. I empirica...