This paper presents an empirical analysis of prosodic phenomena (intonation and timing) in 'common ground units' (Nakatani & Traurn 1999). The analysis is used to address questions of the role of prosody in dialogue while taking into account the complexities of multispeaker discourse. We address some methodological concerns of how best to carry out a study of this kind as well as our theoretica...

1. To point out that there is a Buddhist theory of language; 2. To set forth the fundamental premises of the Buddhist theory of language, which are implicit in the first and most fundamental teaching of the Buddha—the Four Noble Truths; 3. To assert that the Buddhist theory of language is better than the conventional theory of language, which is the theory that currently dominates the linguisti...

This paper presents the first experiments on identifying implicit discourse relations (i.e., relations lacking an overt discourse connective) in French. Given the little amount of annotated data for this task, our system resorts to additional data automatically labeled using unambiguous connectives, a method introduced by (Marcu and Echihabi, 2002). We first show that a system trained solely on...

We present a syntactic and lexically based discourse segmenter (SLSeg) that is designed to avoid the common problem of over-segmenting text. Segmentation is the first step in a discourse parser, a system that constructs discourse trees from elementary discourse units. We compare SLSeg to a probabilistic segmenter, showing that a conservative approach increases precision at the expense of recall...

This study examined teacher}student discourse from a sociocultural perspective in order to ascertain the nature of e!ective instruction for school-age students with learning disabilities. This discussion examines one teacher's resource room instruction that was part of a larger study of teacher}student discourse. The results suggested two considerations: (1) the importance of teacher self-re#ec...

We develop methods for describing users based on their posts to an online discussion forum. These methods build on existing techniques to describe other aspects of online discussions communities, but the application of these techniques to describing users is novel. We demonstrate the utility of our proposed methods by showing that they are superior to existing methods over a post-level classifi...

For some time the notion ‘technocracy’ has been, for better or for worse, associated with the functioning of the European Union (EU). But what role do technocratic assumptions play in the EU’s new ‘symbolic’ policy agenda of democracy promotion, if any? Some authors have suggested that ‘depoliticising’ technocratic biases exist in the EU democracy promotion framework, despite its ‘normative’ rh...

The aim of this study was, by means of discourse analysis (Gee & Green, 1998), to explore what contexts were built and reflected in a student pair’s collaborative task which took place in a university course. The special focus was to develop methodological tools for studying the complex nature of learning embedded in a specific context. The study revealed three different context types that were...

Some methods for inducing topological structures by relations were initiated and their importance in applications were indicated. Topologies generated by equivalence relations were all quasi-discrete spaces. We induced the topologies generated using similarity relations and pre-order relations. Also, the topologies generated using general binary relations on the universe of discourse were initi...