This paper examines the representational requirements for interactive, collaborative systems intended to support sensemaking and argumentation over contested issues. We argue that a perspective supported by semiotic and cognitively oriented discourse analyses offers both theoretical insights and motivates representational requirements for the semantics of tools for contesting meaning. We introd...

Knowledge creation requires identifying and pursuing promising ideas—ideas that in their nascent form may not seem like much but that with development could grow into something big. The goal of our research is to develop a tool to explore the concept of promisingness and “big ideas,” especially elementary school students’ ability to make “promisingness judgments” regarding ideas in peer discour...

The skills involved in argument as a social discourse activity presumably develop during the childhood and adolescent years, but little is known about the course of that development. As an initial step in examining this development, a coding system was developed for the purpose of analyzing multiple dialogues between peers on the topic of capital punishment. A comparison of the dialogues of you...

In this paper, we describe an intervention for children with social and communication deficits, such as autism, based on the use of a virtual peer that can engage in tightly collaborative narrative. We present a study in which children with autism engage in collaborative narrative with both a virtual and a human peer, and the use of contingent discourse is compared. Our findings suggest that co...

This paper summarizes work over the past ve years on the automated planning and generation of multisentence texts using discourse structure relations, placing it in context of ongoing eeorts by Computational Linguists and Linguists to understand the structure of discourse. Based on a series of studies by the author and others, the paper describes how the orientation of generation toward communi...

The technique of reflection is a way to automate proof construction in type theoretical proof assistants. Reflection is based on the definition of a type of syntactic expressions that gets interpreted in the domain of discourse. By allowing the interpretation function to be partial or even a relation one gets a more general method known as “partial reflection”. In this paper we show how one can...

In “On Saying That,” Donald Davidson offered an analysis of indirect discourse that was meant to overcome the classic difficulties of a semantic theory of indirect discourse. Additionally, Davidson’s treatment of indirect discourse was purported to further his project of explaining meaning in a purely extensional, explicitly truth-defined, and compositional manner. The particular paratactic the...

The Japanese discourse particles (sentencefinal particles) ne and yone both have the functions that can be roughly characterized as the ⟨shared information⟩ use and the ⟨call for confirmation⟩ use. In the literature, an adequate descriptive analysis has not been obtained as to how the choice between the two particles is made. This paper aims to clarify discourse conditions under which ne and yo...

Lean management and organizational learning have been seen as two driving forces for today’s business’ success by contributing to competitive advantage in organizations. The aim of this paper is to explore and assess the implementation of lean from the perspective of organizational learning. By revisiting the lean concept and the relationship between lean and learning, we argue that lean has be...

While there is some evidence that causal discourse relations are processed incrementally, the time-course of comprehending concessive discourse markers (e.g., nevertheless) has hardly been investigated. Given that concessives are often defined as negative causals, there may be similarities between the processing of concessives and negations (e.g., a delay). This paper investigates the time-cour...