the fundamental role of discourse and its positive and negative effects in personal and social interactions is known to everyone. this is why religions and denominations have always relied on discourse, especially when it is beyond the boundaries of personal concerns and by the expansion of its domain, have stressed on the vital position and particular role of discourse in the fate of humanity....

Minnesota Contextual Content Analysis (MCCA) is a technique for characterizing the concepts and themes occurring in text (sentences, paragraphs, interview transcripts, books). MCCA tags each word with a category and examines the distribution of categories against norms representing general usage of categories. MCCA also scores texts in terms of social contexts that are similar to different func...

This paper describes work on automatically identifying categories of narrative clauses in personal stories written by ordinary people about their daily lives and experiences. We base our approach on Labov & Waletzky’s theory of oral narrative which categorizes narrative clauses into subtypes, such as ORIENTATION, ACTION and EVALUATION. We describe an experiment where we annotate 50 personal nar...

We applied a discourse analysis (DA) to the electronic chat room discussions of a 16-week, Internet-based section of a class in statistical methods in psychology. This analysis revealed that across the semester, several DA categories (e.g., total number of student comments) were correlated with final grade in the class. An additional analysis involving only the chat room discussion of Week 3 re...

Uncertainty is an important linguistic phenomenon that is relevant in various Natural Language Processing applications, in diverse genres from medical to community generated, newswire or scientific discourse, and domains from science to humanities. The semantic uncertainty of a proposition can be identified in most cases by using a finite dictionary (i.e., lexical cues) and the key steps of unc...

This study examines how Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants have played a contributing role in expanding categories of women's "mental illness" in relation to categories of "normal" behavior. We hypothesized that between 1985 and 2000, as Premenopausal Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD), postpartum depression, and perimenopausal depression were increasingly treated with SSRIs, ...

Theme, focus and contrastive stress are categories which are necessary for the solution of several problems in NLP, including word order determination, scope recognition and anaphora resolution. However, they largely depend on the context, and analysing the discourse structure of a text is di cult and time-consuming. As context has an impact on the order of constituents in context-embedded sent...

This report outlines a 2-year investigation into how secondary science teachers used professional development (PD) to build scientific classroom discourse communities (SCDCs). Observation data, teacher, student, and school demographic information were used to build a hierarchical linear model. The length of time that teachers received PD was the exclusive predictor of change over time, whereas ...