We compare four local feature extraction techniques for the task of face verification, namely (ordered in terms of complexity): raw pixels, raw pixels with mean removal, 2D Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and local Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The comparison is performed in terms of discrimination ability and robustness to illumination changes. We also evaluate the effectiveness of sever...

This paper proposes a novel approach for incorporating discourse information into machine comprehension applications. Traditionally, such information is computed using off-the-shelf discourse analyzers. This design provides limited opportunities for guiding the discourse parser based on the requirements of the target task. In contrast, our model induces relations between sentences while optimiz...

L2 research has shown that instruction in L2 pragmatics is necessary. The current study evaluated the impact of explicit instruction on EFL learner's awareness and production of three speech acts of request, apology, and complaint. It also probed whether learners’ language proficiency plays any role in incorporating pragmatic instruction into the L2 classroom. Iranian undergraduate students maj...

The CoNLL-2016 Shared Task is the second edition of the CoNLL-2015 Shared Task, now on Multilingual Shallow discourse parsing. Similar to the 2015 task, the goal of the shared task is to identify individual discourse relations that are present in natural language text. Given a natural language text, participating teams are asked to locate the discourse connectives (explicit or implicit) and the...

the aim of this article is to analyze the religious discourses represented in the movie “ketabe qanoon”. in this study mikhail bakhtin’s theory on polyphonic novel is used in which he believes that these novels do not have a univocal voice and instead reflect voices of different social strata. in order to analyze the movie, the methodology of laclau and mouffe is used. findings show that the mo...

Airong Wang, Mid-Sweden University This paper reports on a task-based language teaching course in Second Life. The data set consists of transcribed recordings and a teacher interview. Focusing on how the teacher facilitated student participation, this paper aims to explore the discourse functions in the teacher language output and then to address the teacher roles in three different task phases...

Full discourse parsing in the PDTB framework is a task that has only recently been attempted. We present the Two Taggers approach, which reformulates the discourse parsing task as two simpler tagging tasks: identifying the relation within each sentence, and identifying the relation between each pair of adjacent sentences. We then describe a system that uses two CRFs to achieve an F1 score of 39...

The present study aimed to examine the effect of proficiency on pragmatic comprehension speech acts, implicatures, and routines, as well way learners different levels employ strategies when comprehending a task. Thirty-three high-proficiency forty-one low-proficiency Chinese English completed multiple-choice discourse completion task (MDCT). Of participants, six were selected from two groups pe...

Discourse prosody in school-aged children’s narratives was investigated to test for developmental changes in transitional prosody and to characterize the acquisition of key contrastive features for marking continuation versus completion. Spontaneous narratives were obtained from 42 children (5 to 7 years old) and 14 adult caregivers. The narratives were prosodically transcribed using a formal a...

In this paper we consider the problem of analysing sentence-level discourse structure. We introduce discourse chunking (i.e., the identification of intra-sentential nucleus and satellite spans) as an alternative to full-scale discourse parsing. Our experiments show that the proposed modelling approach yields results comparable to state-of-the-art while exploiting knowledge-lean features and sma...