The major aim in our project is to enable flexible dialogue management for intuitive spatial communication. This requires the dynamic negotiation of spatial reference frames, spatial perspectives and discourse strategies. Speakers manage such negotiation by the fine-scale selection and alignment of linguistic forms sensitive to dialogue history, user-group defined norms, and spatial context. Su...

This article reviews six decades of studies regarding the presentation of violent crime on American television, and its impact. We critically discuss the major findings and analyze the political-public discourse regarding the macro-social effects of fictional and non-fictional televised violent crime. The claim made here is that this discourse created “too much fuss over not too much blame” in ...

Various knowledge-based information systems contain distinct knowledge representations reflecting different domains of interest and different viewpoints across domains of discourse. For efficient use of knowledge-based systems it is necessary to know semantic relations or alignment between different knowledge representations. One of the promising approaches is the use of intelligent software ag...

Various knowledge-based information systems contain distinct knowledge representations reflecting different domains of interest and different viewpoints across domains of discourse. For efficient use of knowledge-based systems it is necessary to know semantic relations or alignment between different knowledge representations. One of the promising approaches is the use of intelligent software ag...

In this paper, we study the problem of automatically annotating the factoids present in collective discourse. Factoids are information units that are shared between instances of collective discourse and may have many different ways of being realized in words. Our approach divides this problem into two steps, using a graph-based approach for each step: (1) factoid discovery, finding groups of wo...

Previous experimental studies on concessive connectives have only looked at their local facilitating or predictive effect on discourse relation comprehension and have often viewed them as a class of discourse markers with similar effects. We look into the effect of two connectives, but and although, for inferring contrastive vs. concessive discourse relations to complement previous experimental...

Improvements in computer network infrastructures and information utilities have led to an increase in the number of social and work interactions carried out ‘virtually’ by geographically separated group members [1, 5, 6, 7]. In this paper we describe the design and evaluation of a prototype system that supports synchronous and asynchronous collaboration between researchers separated by space an...

Production and perception experiments with native speakers of Russian, a free word order language, show that prosody and change in word order are used to mark discourse-prominent constituents. Concurrent application of these cues to prominence is possible, as evident from distinctively higher f0 and intensity maxima, and duration values associated with exsitu words, as well as their higher visi...