This doctoral dissertation critically investigates how the concept of metaphor is used with regard to games in game studies. The goal is to provide the field with a self-understanding of its metaphor discourse which has not been researched so far. The thesis departs from the observation that the notion of metaphor has been present in the discourse of game studies since it emerged as an academic...

A Use Case is a specification of interactions involving a system and external actors of that system. The capability for use case modeling has been integrated to the Unified Modeling Language (UML) since its inception. However, use cases are only defined at an abstract level, as the UML Specification does not discuss use case description in text form. In this paper, we propose an abstract syntax...

Automated Essay Scoring has gained a wider applicability and usage with the integration of advanced Natural Language Processing techniques which enabled in-depth analyses of discourse in order capture the specificities of written texts. In this paper, we introduce a novel Automatic Essay Scoring method for Dutch language, built within the Readerbench framework, which encompasses a wide range of...

This study explored the effect of input vs. collaborative output tasks on Iranian EFL learners’ grammatical accuracy and their willingness to communicate (WTC). In so doing, the study utilized 3 input (i.e., textual enhancement, processing instruction, and discourse) and 3 collaborative output (i.e., dictogloss, reconstruction cloze task, and jigsaw) tasks and compared their effects on 5 Englis...

This paper reports results from a corpus-based study that explored the frequency of words in the abstracts of applied linguistics journal articles. The abstracts of major articles in leading applied linguists journals, published since 2005 up to November 2001 were analyzed using software modules from the Compleat Lexical Tutor. The output includes a list of the most frequent content words, list...

This study draws on a comparative framework to evaluate the translation of political implications in three Persian translations of the novellaAnimal Farm (by George Orwell), using  Fairclough’scritical discourse analysis (CDA) model. The study regards political implications and ideologies as a mode of background knowledge shared by writers and audiences in the source language. Fairclough’s mode...

This paper deals with the study of how racist ideologies are constructed in Crane’s “A Dark Brown Dog” using the CDA framework. Benefitting from the approaching between literature and linguistics, it focuses on the linguistic examination of the (re)construction of whiteness and blackness based on the assumption that racism is: a social, a discursive, and an ideological construct. This tri-dimen...

Definition Extraction (DE) is the task to extract textual definitions from naturally occurring text. It is gaining popularity as a prior step for constructing taxonomies, ontologies, automatic glossaries or dictionary entries. These fields of application motivate greater interest in well-formed encyclopedic text from which to extract definitions, and therefore DE for academic or lay discourse h...

This paper presents a discourse processing framework based on weighted abduction. We elaborate on ideas described in Hobbs et al. (1993) and implement the abductive inference procedure in a system called Mini-TACITUS. Particular attention is paid to constructing a large and reliable knowledge base for supporting inferences. For this purpose we exploit such lexical-semantic resources as WordNet ...

In this paper, we describe a system for coreference resolution and emphasize the role of evaluation for its design. The goal of the system is to group referring expressions (identified beforehand in narrative texts) into sets of coreferring expressions that correspond to discourse entities. Several knowledge sources are distinguished, such as referential compatibility between a referring expres...