This paper presents CoPe_it!, an innovative web-based tool that supports collaboration and augments learning among members of diverse communities. The tool fosters the means to manage individual and collective knowledge during a sense-making or a decision-making session. We demonstrate its applicability for Communities of Practice (CoPs) by examining it from both a learning and an argumentative...

Although L2 writing has attracted salient attention and monopolized many studies in EFL contexts, there is still no full image of its complicated nature.  Trying to play a supplementary role in achieving that image, this study aimed at finding whether Persian and English argumentative and descriptive academic writings were inter/intra-lingually associated and if genre played a role in p...

It seems rather natural to admit that language use is governed by rules that relate signs, forms and meanings to possible intentions or possible interpretations, in function of utterance situations. Not less natural should seem the idea that the meaning of a natural language expression conveys enough material to the input of these rules, so that, given the situation of utterance, they determine...

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...

In two experiments, we examine university students’ ability to comprehend authentic argumentative texts and factors that influence their application of this skill. Participants read several relatively lengthy arguments and identified the main claim and reasons. Experiment 1 shows that participants are not skilled at identifying key elements from an argumentative text (only 30% accuracy). The pe...

The segmentation of an argumentative text into argument units and their nonargumentative counterparts is the first step in identifying the argumentative structure of the text. Despite its importance for argument mining, unit segmentation has been approached only sporadically so far. This paper studies the major parameters of unit segmentation systematically. We explore the effectiveness of vari...

The use of agent's technology in electronic commerce environments leads to the necessity to introduce some sort of formal attitude in the processes of software development and analysis. Logic programming and specially extended logic programming provides a powerful tool for achieving such goal; i.e., besides being mathematically correct it makes the prototyping phase easier. However, although no...