This paper focuses on two specific developments in writing pedagogy – discourse communities and genre knowledge – to guide engineering faculty in developing assignments that effectively foster the communication abilities needed in today’s engineering workplace. It outlines current research in these areas, defines critical concepts, and provides examples of how faculty might design assignments t...

As climate change became an increasingly prominent topic in both scientific and public discourse over the past two decades, technical terms like "stationarity" and "nonstationarity" also became more conspicuous. Historically, such terms arose in the mathematics literature, and have been commonly used in engineering and related disciplines. Indeed, stationarity and nonstationarity have tradition...

A generator based on Combinatory Categorial Grammar using a simple and domain-independent discourse model can be used to direct synthesis of intonation contours for responses to data-base queries, conveying distinctions of contrast and emphasis determined by the discourse model and the state of the knowledge-base. Comments University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Scienc...

This article examines the merits of the proposition that design and inquiry are conceptual parallels. It does so by first looking closely at the inquiry-related discourse within science education, then at aspects of the design discourse within engineering, and finally within technology education. Convergences and divergences of these two streams of curricular advocacy are then identified, and i...

This paper outlines a prototypical work bench which offers semantically enhanced analytical capabilities to the business analyst. The business case for such an environment is outlined and user scenario development used to illustrate system requirements. Based upon ideas from meta-discourse and exploiting advances within the fields of ontology engineering, annotation, natural language processing...

A simple representation framework for ontological knowledge with dynamic and deontic characteristics is presented. It represents structural relationships (is-a, part/whole), dynamic relationships (actions such as register, pay, etc.), and conditional relationships (if-then-else). As a case study, we apply our representation language to the task of requirements elicitation in software engineerin...

Creativity involves choosing to direct resources toward developing novel ideas. Information technology development, including software engineering, requires creative discourse among team members to design and implement a novel, competitive product that meets usability, performance, and functional requirements set by the customer. In this paper, we present results that correlate metrics of creat...

Production of multimedia artifacts demands guidance for both engineers developing software and designers generating content. This paper distinguishes conceptually between media, multiple media and multimedia and defines the multimedia document as both communicative object and system, thus identifying integration as a fundamental of production; it proposes media transformations as a means of des...

Recent advances in RST discourse parsing have focused on two modeling paradigms: (a) high order parsers which jointly predict the tree structure of the discourse and the relations it encodes; or (b) lineartime parsers which are efficient but mostly based on local features. In this work, we propose a linear-time parser with a novel way of representing discourse constituents based on neural netwo...

The present study reports the use of an interview task to identify the initial conceptions of engineering and teaching engineering held by secondary mathematics and science teachers upon entering a professional development program. Results obtained from this task gave insight on several points, including: (1) the requirements for a task to be considered engineering; (2) the role of a student in...