Taking an interdisciplinary and bimodal approach to genre analysis, this paper examines the influence of an IT system on a genre of technical communication: the technical trouble ticket. This genre is examined first as an organizational practice, and then as a set of rhetorical statements; finally, the two approaches are combined and the role of the system in creating, controlling and enabling ...

Ontology authoring is a specialised task requiring amongst other things a deep knowledge of the ontology language being used. Understanding and reusing ontologies can thus be difficult for domain experts, who tend not to be ontology experts. To address this problem, we have developed a Natural Language Generation system for transforming the axioms that form the definitions of ontology classes i...

In this paper we describe a model for automatically generating video documentaries. This allows viewers to specify the subject and the point of view of the documentary to be generated. The domain is matter-of-opinion documentaries based on interviews. The model combines rhetorical presentation patterns used by documentary makers with a data-driven approach. Rhetorical presentation patterns prov...

The explosion in the number of students taking online courses warrants a deeper understanding of instructor strategies that meet rhetorical and relational goals. Guided by social presence theory and rhetorical and relational goals theory, 329 participants were randomly assigned into one of three manipulated social presence online learning conditions to watch a short lecture. The student percept...

In the project SemDok (Generic document structures in linearly organised texts) funded by the German Research Foundation DFG, a discourse parser for a complex type (scientific articles by example), is being developed. Discourse parsing (henceforth DP) according to the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) (Mann and Taboada, 2005; Marcu, 2000) deals with automatically assigning a text a tree structu...

To better understand the promising effects of data-driven learning (DDL) on language learning processes and outcomes, this study explored DDL learning events enabled by the Research Writing Tutor (RWT), a webbased platform that contains: an English language corpus annotated to enhance rhetorical input; a concordancer searchable for rhetorical functions; and an automated writing evaluation engin...

The AlethGen tool has been used to build a system for automatically generating replies to complaints, for a European mail-order company. In the current version, letters are generated in French. AlethGen consists of several modules: the text deep structure planner (or conceptual planner), the text surface structure planner (or rhetorical planner), the computation of pronouns and quantifiers, and...

According to experts in rhetoric, Interrogation refers to asking about a thing which is unknown to the speaker and aims at knowing something; they mention, however, that these statements deviate from their real purposes sometimes and refer to some other secondary meanings. Writers have mentioned more or less different secondary purposes mainly based on the Quran. More recent writers have also p...

It is now generally accepted that academic writing is a social activity by which the authors negotiate with their audience to gain community acceptance for their findings. One of the ways to achieve such an acceptance is by establishing intertextual links to prior research using citation. Despite a vast research on the topic and suggestion of typologies for the form and function of citation in ...

Novice academic writers, particularly Iranian graduate students (IGSs), upon entering an academic community, are hypothesized to face probable difficulties in practicing rhetorical expectations set by the experienced (EXP) members, hence, not being able to write in a way acceptable to these professionals. To explore the probable rhetorical distance between them, this study investigated the empl...