The study of argumentation has undergone periods of decadence alternate with periods of renaissance. Currently, we are witnessing one of the latter, as proved by research flowering in many issues and aspects, both in Philosophy and in Artificial Intelligence. The work presented in this thesis is concerned in particular with “rhetorical argumentation”, which on the other hand has enjoyed conside...

Then he went about his regular, non-Twitter affairs. The next afternoon, fresh from a nap, he checked his account, stared at the outcome, and tweeted to @upulieto, an associate, “I just woke up. What a mess” [49]. His tweet had spiraled virally: tens of thousands of likes, retweets, endless streams of commentary. Why? Well, lots of factors, of course. There is rarely a single factor to which on...

In many applications in computational linguistics, such as machine translation, we want to understand why a writer has used language in a particular way, what specific effects she intended to convey, and which linguistic choices were made to achieve those goals. This idea, that a writer has specific communicative goals or intentions in mind when she composes text, goes back to the study of clas...

We describe a classifier which determines the rhetorical status of sentences in texts from a corpus of judgments of the UK House of Lords. Our summarisation system is based on the work of Teufel and Moens where sentences are classified for rhetorical status to aid sentence selection. We experiment with a variety of linguistic features with results comparable to Teufel and Moens, thereby demonst...

This chapter defines professional communication in intercultural contexts. It presents a workable model of culture, connects that model to rhetoric, and provides a method to analyze rhetorics and cultures in intercultural contexts. It also contextualizes the model of intercultural rhetorical research in prevailing paradigms of rhetoric and professional communication, strongly criticizing the lo...

Many essential components of language charted by rhetoric, the ancient study of persuasion, remain understudied and underrepresented in current Natural Language systems. Our goal is to combine linguistic and rhetorical theories with discourse analysis and machine learning to develop formal models of computational rhetoric that may be usefully applied in real-world Computational Linguistics syst...

Hypermedia communicative devices are patterns of hypermedia presentation structure with specific affects on the user. Some devices have been determined for affecting the user with abstract authoring constructs, such as rhetorical structure. However, these devices each typically focus on particular aspects of the structure of hypermedia presentation. This paper presents a framework for hypermedi...

Transitioning from graduate student to early career faculty can often provoke uncertainty and questioning. This study explores the rhetorical revealing nature of such questioning (i.e., Am I really this lost? in right place?). Utilizing methods arts based research (Barone & Eisner, 2012), specifically poetic inquiry (Prendergast et al., 2009; Richardson, 1992), we created found poetry aroun...