This essay reports part of the results of a questionnaire investigating 74 college students’ self-evaluation of their writing behaviors and beliefs on the macro discourse level. Then it moves on to analyze the statistics obtained about students’ macro-level writing behaviors and beliefs in terms of making an outline, writing a thesis, providing topic sentences and making conclusions and the pur...

In this paper we apply natural language understanding and topic modeling methods to create an instructional tool for assessing science discourse in interactive multimedia presentations that are created, shared and discussed by students. The resulting assessment prototype will enable teachers to follow student discourse in real time, to understand gaps in student learning, and to improve teachin...

Topic structure in longer discourses has been shown to be marked in speech by prosodic variations, e.g. variations in fundamental frequency (F0) and speech rate. We investigated whether variations in voice quality, specifically aperiodicity as an aspect of glottalization, were also signals to topic structure by varying to indicate the strength of discourse boundaries. We found that variation in...

In this paper we are concerned with the location of topics in text processing and the determination of the update unit in looking up topic continuations and topic shifts. Using key elements of the Centering Model of local discourse coherence and empirical evidence from Modern Greek and Japanese we argue that the appropriate update unit for topic tracking is the sentence in its traditional sense...

The main aim of this thesis is to provide insight into the interaction of the syntactic and pragmatic properties of German, particularly with respect to the issue of congurationality. This language is particularly di cult to classify as it displays both subject-object asymmetries (a feature of \con gurational" languages), but also has a topic position (a feature of \discourse-con gurational" la...

BACKGROUND Considering the cognitive and linguistic complexity of discourse production, it is expected that individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) should face difficulties in this task. Therefore, clinical examination of discourse has become a useful tool for studying and assessment of communication skills of people suffering from TBI. Among different genres of discourse, persuasive disc...

In this paper we propose a computational treatment of the resolution of zero pronouns in Japanese discourse, using an adaptation of the centering algorithm. We are able to factor language-specific dependencies into one parameter of the centering algorithm. Previous analyses have stipulated that a zero pronoun and its cospecifier must share a grammatical function property such as Subject or NonS...

I present an unitary analysis of the German adversative connectors aber and doch, based on Sæbø (2003), where the semantics of these connectors is defined in terms of a presupposition involving negation and topic alternatives. I argue that the meaning of aber and doch is underspecified between various types of contrast and that the type of contrast they indicate in particular context is determi...