Abstract Through the interpretation of texts, and subsequent creation of social reality, mediated representations are often seen to be presented within the certain of ideological discourses that reflect the existing power structures. The main objective of this paper is to analyze television commercials with an emphasis on gender roles to decode the main elements of a dominant discourse (prefer...

In this paper I discuss some of the implications for state education that arise from what I argue is the ambiguous and flexible nature of the term ‘social exclusion’. I briefly consider the conceptual relationship between social exclusion, poverty and deprivation. Using the metaphor of story, I explore the operation of the term in the New Labour project, with particular attention to some of its...

How do we know when critical terms lose their power? Could it be that some of the fundamental notions of literary and cultural studies have been adopted so broadly in so many contexts and disciplines that they explain too much, and thus not enough? This is true for terms such as textuality, discourse, narrative, and representation, some of our colleagues have claimed. If critical terms originat...

This thesis is two fold. The first part deals with an existence proof of a formal algorithm that takes a narrative discourse and returns its semantic representation in the Event Calculus (EC from now on) [19]. This algorithm uses Discourse Representation Theory, and takes on the form of a translation from Discourse Representation Structures to Scenarios and Integrity Constraints in EC. The seco...

This paper attempts to apply the techniques of discourse analysis to some of the key concepts in educational management. It employs a conceptual framework which is informed by management theory and policy studies as well as by the literature on discourse. The central part of the paper considers examples of discursive forms which serve to disguise or conceal the power dimension in educational in...

Intelligent storytelling systems either formalize specific narrative structures proposed by narratologists (such as Propp and Bremond), or are founded on formal representations from artificial intelligence (such as plan structures from classical planning). This disparity in underlying knowledge representations leads to a lack of common evaluation metrics across story generation systems, particu...

Getting a machine to understand human narratives has been a classic challenge for NLP and AI. This paper proposes a new representation for the temporal structure of narratives. The representation is parsimonious, using temporal relations as surrogates for discourse relations. The narrative models, called Temporal Discourse Models, are treestructured, where nodes include abstract events interpre...