Drawing upon sociocultural theory of Vygotsky, the current study aims to investigate the effect of dyadic interaction in mixed and matched level proficiency pairings on comprehension and production of request and apology speech acts. The participants were 125 EFL learners who were randomly assigned to control and experimental (interaction) groups. Based on their scores in the pretest including ...

An assumption shared by many theories of discourse is that discourse structure constrains anaphora resolution (cf. Grosz and Sidner 1986] for deenite NPs, Lascarides and Asher 1991], Nakhimovsky 1988] for temporal anaphora, Webber 1990] for deictic pronouns and Gardent 1991], Pr ust and Scha 1990] for VP ellipsis). The aim of this paper is (i) to show that this assumption also applies to multip...

the present study, on the one hand, attempted to investigate the strategies applied in dispreferred responses by iranian university students of english and the extent to which pragmatic transfer could occur.  on the other hand, the study aimed to probe into the association between dispreferred organization and turn-shape. to this end, 31 relevant naturally occurring conversations, totaling 120 ...

Performance evaluations of NLP systems have been designed and conducted that require systems to extract certain prespecified information about events and entities. A single text may describe multiple events and entities, and the evaluation task requires the system to resolve references to produce the expected output.We describe an early attempt to use the results from an information extraction ...

In example (1), a sentence from a Wall Street Journal article taken from the Penn TreeBank corpus is further segmented into four EDUs, (1a), (1b), (1c) and (1d) (RST, 2002). Discourse segmentation, clearly, is not as easy as sentence boundary detection. The lack of consensus with regards to what constitutes an elementary discourse unit adds to the difficulty. Building a rule based discourse seg...