Conversation between two people is usually of Mixed-Initiative, with Control over the conversation being transferred from one person to another. We apply a set of rules for the transfer of control to 4 sets of dialogues consisting of a total of 1862 turns. The application of the control rules lets us derive domain-independent discourse structures. The derived structures indicate that initiative...

There is an emerging trend in higher education for the adoption of massive open online courses (MOOCs). However, despite this interest in learning at scale, there has been limited work investigating the impact MOOCs can play on student learning. In this study, we adopt a novel approach, using language and discourse as a tool to explore its association with two established measures related to le...

In a reading production experiment we investigate the impact of punctuation and discourse structure on the prosodic differentiation of right dislocation (RD) and afterthought (AT). Both discourse structure and punctuation are likely to affect the prosodic marking of these right-peripheral constructions, as certain prosodic markings are appropriate only in certain discourse structures, and punct...

In this paper, we present the foundations and the properties of the Dislog language, a logic-based language designed to describe and implement discourse structure analysis. Dislog has the flexibility and the expressiveness of a rule-based system, it offers the possibility to include knowledge and reasoning capabilities and the expression a variety of well-formedness constraints proper to discou...

Dialogue in commercial games is largely created by teams of writers and designers who hand-author every line of dialogue and hand-specify the dialogue structure using finite state machines or branching trees. For dialogue heavy games, such as role playing games with significant NPC interactions, or emerging genres such as interactive drama, such hand specification significantly limits the playe...

Using application oriented conceptual maps to categorize the group discussion would be an advancement in the design of CMC systems to allow much larger groups to collaborate productively. The group meta communication process should allow the group to modify and evolve these conceptual discourse templates.

Textual coherence versus discourse structure Coherence is one of the most general and most widely discussed concepts in the study of text and discourse In spite or perhaps because of its central status the concept of coherence has many di erent and often incompatible de nitions and connotations For text linguistics or psycholinguistics with their focus on the representation and processing of in...

The analogy between traditional analog telephone service and traditional paper maps fosters a useful exploration of the importance of standards and the emergence of hybrid products facilitated by new technology but bound by inertia or circumstance to past practices. Compared to telecommunications, in which protocols of all types have been indispensable, few universal standards have emerged for ...

Negative Polarity Items (NPI) are expressions such as English ever and lift a finger that only occur in sentences that are somehow “negative”. NPIs have puzzled linguists working in syntax, semantics and pragmatics, but no final conclusion as to which module of the grammar should be responsible for the licensing has been reached. Within HPSG interest in NPI has developed only relatively recentl...