The skills involved in argument as a social discourse activity presumably develop during the childhood and adolescent years, but little is known about the course of that development. As an initial step in examining this development, a coding system was developed for the purpose of analyzing multiple dialogues between peers on the topic of capital punishment. A comparison of the dialogues of you...

The author hypothesizes that variation in features of representational tools can have a significant effect on collaborative learning discourse, and hence on learning outcomes. Representational tools mediate collaborative learning discourse by providing learners with the means to express their emerging knowledge in a persistent medium, where the knowledge then becomes part of the shared context....

BACKGROUND The PRC Adaptive Knowledge-based Text Understanding System (PAKTUS) has been unde r development as an Independent Research and Development project at PRC since 1984 . It includes a core English lexicon and grammar, a concept network, processes for applying these to lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse analysis, and tools that support the adaptation of the generi c core to new ...

Protecting children online has been a focus of research in psychiatry and sociology for many years. However, the anonymous nature of the Internet has made finding a solution to the problem of child protection online difficult. The current study proposes going beyond the identification of an individual online predator to the recognition of predatory discourse enacted via coercion within frames o...

In this paper we present a cognitive model of the acquisition and use of referring expressions in discourse. In certain discourse contexts, children produce unrecoverable pronouns where a full NP would have been the adult choice. Based on computational simulations of our model, we argue that adult-like use of referring subjects requires (a) sufficient working memory capacity to identify the dis...

It has been argued that the use of inverse voice in languages with pragmatic inversion depends on the discourse status of the referents: this voice occurs when the patient outranks the agent in topicality. In our article, we present empirical evidence from Teribe, a Chibchan language of Panama and Costa Rica and we examine the interaction between inverse voice and information structure. We repo...

Annotating biomedical text with discourse-level information is a well-studied topic. Several research efforts have annotated textual zones (e.g., sentences or clauses) with information about rhetorical status, whilst other efforts have linked and classified sets of text spans according to the type of discourse relation holding between them. A relatively new approach has involved annotating meta...

GETARUNS, the system for text and reference understanding which is currently used for summarization and text generation has a highly sophisticated linguistically based semantic module which is used to build up the Discourse Model. Semantic processing is strongly modularized and distributed amongst a number of different submodules which take care of Spatio-Temporal Reasoning, Discourse Level Ana...

This paper proposes the interpretation of video games as discourse (in the explanation of discourse commonly used in linguistics and studies of natural language, not as understood in semiotics or cultural studies) to explore further the dynamics through which video games can propose structured meaning and articulate an argument. Such topic is especially relevant for video games with an agenda, ...

Child-directed speech is often temporally organized such that successive utterances refer to the same topic. This type of extended discourse on the same referent has been shown to possess several verbal signatures that could facilitate learning. Here, we reveal multiple non-verbal correlates to extended discourse that could also aid learning. Multimodal analyses of extended discourse episodes r...