Family planning has been imported to Greece as a means of encouraging individuals to become modern adults by rationalizing their sexual relations and fertility-control efforts. But family-planning discourse neglects how such factors as emotion and so-called traditional belief—including gender norms— guide people's reasonable actions. In this article, I examine how the purported gender neutralit...

Effective communication helps communities to achieve common goals, but is especially hard to achieve in virtual adversarial collaborative communities. In these communities, the matching of widely differing objectives as well as interests is very complex. We study a case of a virtual adversarial collaborative community in which the common goal was to author reports assessing the amount of true c...

We describe the use of analogies in 75 one-on-one tutoring sessions with first-year medical students carried on by two professors of physiology at Rush Medical College. Analogies were not very frequent, but were extremely effective when they were used. We have analyzed the goals, the topics, and the discourse strategies for proposing analogies. We have also studied the ways that the tutors foll...

Teaching Computational Linguistics is inherently multi-disciplinary and frequently poses challenges and provides opportunities in teaching to a student body with diverse educational backgrounds and goals. This paper describes the use of a computational environment (SIDGrid) that facilitates interdisciplinary instruction by providing support for students with little computational background as w...

This paper describes a new Cornell University course serving as a nonprogramming introduction to computer science, with natural language processing and information retrieval forming a crucial part of the syllabus. Material was drawn from a wide variety of topics (such as theories of discourse structure and random graph models of the World Wide Web) and presented at some technical depth, but was...

Statecharts are a popular representation technique for conceptual models of the dynamics of a universe of discourse. However, designers are not supported in their work with dynamic models as well as they are for working with static models. We present a meta-model and a formalization of the semantics of a statechart language. Important results are the definition of the equivalence of statecharts...

In spatial dialog like in direction giving humans make frequent use of speechaccompanying gestures. Some gestures convey largely the same information as speech while others complement speech. This paper reports a study on how speakers distribute meaning across speech and gesture, and depending on what factors. Utterance meaning and the wider dialog context were tested by statistically analyzing...

Entity description is an essential task in automatic generation of text for any kind of discouse. Every text needs to refer to domain elements with different goals, and the baseline of these references would be the descriptions of these elements presented before. Two of the main tasks of Natural Language Generation (NLG) are involved in this process: Content Determination and Referring Expressi...

It is generally accepted that a discourse connective expresses a semantic and/or pragmatic relation between its matrix sentence or clause and something in the previous discourse. Usually the sense of this relation is expressed as a label, often within a hierarchy of sense labels. But the meaning of these labels may vary from system to system, and the same connective may be assigned different la...