The present paper combines two lines of research from discourse analysis and psychology by investigating thinking-aloud data and retrospective reports related to a cognitively demanding task, namely, a variant of the well-known Traveling Salesman Problem involving navigation to a set of goals. The analysis addresses the linguistic variability emerging from a discourse-analytic comparison of thr...

Segmentation of spoken discourse into distinct conversational activities has been applied to broadcast news, meetings, monologs, and two-party dialogs. This paper considers the aspectual properties of discourse segments, meaning how they transpire in time. Classifiers were constructed to distinguish between segment boundaries and non-boundaries, where the sizes of utterance spans to represent d...

Previous work in generating explanations from advicegiving systems has demonstrated that a cooperative system can and should infer the immediate goals and plans of an utterance (or discourse segment) and formulate a response in light of these goals and plans. The claim of this paper is that a cooperative response may also have to address a user's overall goals, plans, and preferences among thos...

While the right to health is increasingly referenced in Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) discussions, its contribution to global health and development remains subject to considerable debate. This hypothesis explores the potential influence of the right to health on the formulation of health goals in 4 major SDG reports. We analyse these reports through a social constructivist lens which view...

Recent communicative approaches have suggested that one goal of English language teaching should be to replicate 'genuine' or 'natural' rather than 'typical' or 'traditional' classroom communication. This article argues that such a goal is both paradoxical and unattainable, and that there are serious flaws in the assumptions underlying the communicative orthodoxy concerning ELT classroom intera...

Natural language generation is a knowledge-intensive, goal-directed process involving many interacting choices. Some questions that a generation system must answer include: what information needs to be included in the output to satisfy the speaker's or writer's communicative goals? how should a discourse contribution be structured to ensure its coherence? which modalities should be used to maxi...

Paragraph-by-paragraph machine translation seems to be for now, an unjustifiably complicated task for practical needs. It involves the complete understanding of the paragraph, the determination of discourse topic(s), goals, intentions, so that the output can be produced in accordance with the respective discourse rules and purposes. However, recognizing topic, goal, intention by a computer prog...

[1] Is there yet any serious discourse theory with testable computational and empirical consequences? [2] What phenomena ought a processing theory of discourse understanding/generation to address itself that are not already being attended to currently? [3] What aspects of discourse are language problems and which are general AI/KR problems? [4] What makes a theory of discourse a processing theo...

Paragraph-by-paragraph machine translation seems to be for now, an unjustifiably complicated task for practical needs. It involves the complete understanding of the paragraph, the determination of discourse topic(s), goals, intentions, so that the output can be produced in accordance with the respective discourse rules and purposes. However, recognizing topic, goal, intention by a computer prog...

Rhetorical Structure Theory is a theory of text organization that has led to areas of application beyond discourse analysis and text generation, its original goals. In this paper, we review the most important applications in several areas: discourse analysis, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. We also provide a list of resources useful for work within the...