This paper details a software architecture for discourse processing in spoken dialogue systems, where the three component tasks of discourse processing are (1) Dialogue Management, (2) Context Tracking, and (3) Pragmatic Adaptation. We define these three component tasks and describe their roles in a complex, near-future scenario in which multiple humans interact with each other and with compute...

1 Abstract In developing lexicons to support a scoring system for open-ended test questions and a content analysis system, we found it necessary to extend the conventional notion of a semantic network as consisting of concept nodes and (perhaps several kinds of) labeled links by adding nodes for pseudoentries capturing semantic features (as in typed feature structures) and by viewing links as n...

Despite notable exceptions, research on requests in world Englishes has so far largely involved role plays, questionnaires and discourse completion tasks. Moreover, South Asian varieties of English is rather scarce. Therefore, the present study employs a multifactorial approach towards Indian Sri Lankan as compared to their historical input variety British by investigating spoken components Int...

Among the most innovative features of the TOEFL® Internet-based test (TOEFL iBT) are the addition of a speaking measure and a revised writing measure consisting of two writing tasks. The speaking and writing measures include both independent and integrated tasks. Independent tasks require test takers to talk or write about their personal opinions or experiences. Integrated tasks require the use...

Penn Discourse Treebank style discourse parsing is a composite task of identifying discourse relations (explicit or nonexplicit), their connective and argument spans, and assigning a sense to these relations from the hierarchy of senses. In this paper we describe University of Trento parser submitted to CoNLL 2015 Shared Task on Shallow Discourse Parsing. The span detection tasks for explicit r...

This paper presents a knowledge base containing triples involving pairs of verbs associated with semantic or discourse relations. The relations in these triples are marked by discourse connectors between two adjacent instances of the verbs in the triple in the large French corpus, frWaC. We detail several measures that evaluate the relevance of the triples and the strength of their association....

This paper presents a knowledge base containing triples involving pairs of verbs associated with semantic or discourse relations. The relations in these triples are marked by discourse connectors between two adjacent instances of the verbs in the triple in the large French corpus, frWaC. We detail several measures that evaluate the relevance of the triples and the strength of their association....

Pragmatic competence is one of the most important components of successful communication; also, it is the most difficult aspect of SLA. This study aimed to explore the effects of concurrent group dynamic assessment (G-DA) on Iranian EFL learners’ learning of requests and refusals, following a mixed method design. In the experimental part of the study, 2 intact classes were homogenized by a pret...

Drawing upon sociocultural theory of Vygotsky, the current study aims to investigate the effect of dyadic interaction in mixed and matched level proficiency pairings on comprehension and production of request and apology speech acts. The participants were 125 EFL learners who were randomly assigned to control and experimental (interaction) groups. Based on their scores in the pretest including ...

    A review of previous research on receptive skills among EFL learners  reveals that in contrast  to extensive research in reading, fewer studies have focused on the process  of listening comprehension in EFL contexts. The current study examines the effects of discourse signaling cues on Iranian EFL students' listening comprehension in academic lectures and also investigates the effect of tea...