this paper investigates learner-initiated responses to english language teachers’ referential questions and learner initiatives after teachers’ feedback moves in meaning-focused question-answer sequences to analyze how interactional practices of language teachers, their initiation and feedback moves, facilitate learner initiatives. classroom discourse research has largely neglected learner init...

This paper presents a computational model of referential metaphor comprehension. This model is designed on top of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a model of the representation of word and text meanings. Comprehending a referential metaphor consists in scanning the semantic neighbors of the metaphor in order to find words that are also semantically related to the context. The depth of that searc...

Cross-situational learning is a mechanism for learning the meaning of words across multiple exposures, despite exposure-by-exposure uncertainty as to a word's true meaning. Doubts have been expressed regarding the plausibility of cross-situational learning as a mechanism for learning human-scale lexicons in reasonable timescales under the levels of referential uncertainty likely to confront rea...

To enable effective referential grounding in situated human robot dialogue, we have conducted an empirical study to investigate how conversation partners collaborate and mediate shared basis when they have mismatched visual perceptual capabilities. In particular, we have developed a graph-based representation to capture linguistic discourse and visual discourse, and applied inexact graph matchi...

This paper presents a quantitative modeling of referential coherence by which conversation systems measure the smoothness of discourse. Investigations of the corpora show that referential coherence depends on languages or genres of discourse. Our goal is to establish a quantitative model that can be statistically adapted to various languages. Centering theory explains referential coherence by u...