This article examines the discourse of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). Using Dryzek’s (2005) discourse analysis of 1970s survivalism, I assess whether OPT’s work is simply a return to the survivalism described by Dryzek. I look to see how climate change has influenced survivalist discourse in recent years, and at the key role of women’s rights and fertility in OPT discourse. The first secti...

Handling of human language by computer is a very intricate and complex task. In natural languages, sentences are usually part of discourse units just as words are part of sentences. Anaphora resolution plays a significant role in discourse analysis for chopping larger discourse units into smaller ones. This process is done for the purpose of better understanding and making easier the further pr...

In this paper we discuss the influence of semantically unexpected information on the prosodic realization of contrast. For this purpose, we examine the interplay between unexpectedness and various discourse factors that have been claimed to enhance the accentuation of contrastive information: contrast direction, syntactic status, and discourse distance. We conducted a production experiment in D...

Using media discourse analysis for material published by the press on schistosomiasis in the city of Jaboticatubas, the possible determining factors of narrative and discursive constructions in the diffusion of information are discussed. It was observed that media discourse treats schistosomiasis in 1962 as something from the natural order. By 1997 and 1998, the media discourse strategies revea...

In this paper two studies are presented in which the detection of speech recognition errors on the word level was examined. In the first study, memory-based and transformation-based machine learning was used for the task, using confidence, lexical, contextual and discourse features. In the second study, we investigated which factors humans benefit from when detecting errors. Information from th...

Understanding the temporal relations which hold between situations described in a narrative is a highly complex process. The main aim of this thesis is to investigate the factors we have to take into account in order to determine the temporal coherence of a narrative discourse. In particular, aspectual information, tense, and world and context knowledge have to be considered and the interplay o...