This paper reports on the development of a computational theory of discourse The theory is based on the thesis that discourse structure is a composite of three structures the structure of the sequence of utterances, the structure of intentions conveyed, and the attentional state. The distinction among these components is essential to provide adequate explanations of such discourse phenomena as ...

In the last decade, members of the computational linguistics community have adopted a perspective on discourse based primarily on either Rhetorical Structure Theory or Grosz and Sidner’s Theory. However, only recently, researchers have started to investigate the relationship between the two perspectives. In this paper, we use Moser and Moore’s (1996) work as a departure point for extending Marc...

Halliday (1984) argues that the study of language as a uniied object can only be jus-tiied if linguists address language simultaneously as both a process and a system of relations. Birmingham-style Discourse Analysis (DA) is one model of discourse that has been developed to satisfy Halliday's challenge. However, DA has only been applied to two-party discourse, and would seem to fall short of ac...

The present study examines perceived prosodic highlights in three genres of fluent continuous Mandarin to test (1) whether prosodic highlights are genre related, (2) how they interact with discourse structure, (3) how they signal information status, (4) whether systematic acoustic patterns could be obtained from speech data analysis, and (5) whether prosodic highlights is layered over to discou...

for WPSI IV. Joseph Tyler, University of Michigan. At least since Harris (1952), researchers have studied how language is organized above the level of a single sentence. A number of approaches have been proposed, e.g. using semantic and pragmatic information, assessments of social action, and inferences about speaker intentions. But how do we know if a theory captures how speakers mentally repr...

This study discusses the possibility of the integrated analytic approach to discourse in CSCL by the combination of macro network analysis and micro analysis of argument on students’ written discourse. Although studies have established fine-grained analytic approaches to discourse or argumentation in CSCL environments, we still have difficulty with evaluating collective knowledge advancement. T...