Computer conferencing is an important emerging technology that promises to have dramatic effects on coordinating the development of large-scale engineering projects. The technology provides instant inexpensive access to all those involved in a project, thereby reducing project costs and enhancing quality. This article outlines key principles that are necessary to realize the full potential of c...

We report on an experiment that investigated how people naturally communicate with computational devices using speech and gaze. Our approach follows from the idea that human-human conversation involves the establishment of common ground, the use of gaze direction to indicate attention and turn-taking, and awareness of other’s knowledge and abilities. Our goal is to determine whether it is easie...

This paper presents discourse analysis techniques that model the interaction of a small group of users engaged in same-place/differenttime interaction. We analyzed data from VesselWorld, our experimental testbed, and formulated a modeling technique based on the recurrence of coordination problems and the structure that users create to handle these problems. Subsequent experiments revealed that ...

One of the important functions of every Semiotic system is its local function. In a discourse, places have various roles such as objective, acting, being, abstract, narrative and mythical. In addition they have referential, narrative, tensional, metaphorical and transcendental functions and they play a role in creation of meaning. By strengthening objective and physical aspects of place, its co...

This study examined the effect of the ZPD-based discourse scaffolding on EFL learners' co-construction of L2 metadiscourse performing collaborative writing tasks and explored the discourse scaffolding dynamics. The participants were 160 EFL students that were assigned to four different treatment conditions: (i) formal teaching, (ii) input enhancement, (iii) non-ZPD interaction, and (iv) ZPD-bas...

Media can be a good representation of dominant ideologies in society. The analysis of such discourse can shed light on the mental and social structures of people in society. Adopting van Dijk’s (1995) layout of discourse ideology and his (2000) practical and general outline of ideological analysis, this study analyzes the Iranian movie A Separation, the winner of the 84th An...

Repetition and semantic-associative priming effects have been demonstrated for words in nonstructured contexts (i.e., word pairs or lists of words) in numerous behavioral and electrophysiological studies. The processing of a word has thus been shown to benefit from the prior presentation of an identical or associated word in the absence of a constraining context. An examination of such priming ...

From a multimodal point of view, the functions which have generally been attributed to linguistic elements of discourse (known, as a rule, as discourse markers or connectors within the several discourse analytic theories) can also be fulfilled by prosody and nonverbal units. These types of discourse functions, here called interactive conversational signals, a subgroup of the conversational sign...

Near-term spoken language systems will likely be limited in their interactive capabilities. To design them, we shall need to model how the presence or absence of speaker interaction influences spoken discourse patterns in different types of tasks. In this research, a comprehensive examination is provided of the discourse structure and performance efficiency of both interactive and noninteractiv...

Discourse markers, also known as clue words, are used extensively in human-human task-oriented dialogs to signal the structure of the discourse. Previous work showed their importance in monologs and social conversations for marking discourse structure , but little attention has been paid to their importance in spoken dialog systems. This paper investigates what discourse markers signal about th...