This article contrasts Mark Bevir’s approach to the history of ideas with a neoGramscian theory of discourse. Bevir puts the case for an ‘anti-foundationalist’ approach to understanding ideas, yet he defends a weak rationalism centred on individual intentions as the original source of all meanings. Discourse theorists specifically Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe also adopt an anti-foundationa...

‘Concern Alignment in Conversations’ project aims, through empirical examinations of real-life conversations, to establish a theoretical and descriptive framework to capture discourse structures and underlying rational and affective processes in human-human joint planning interactions at dialogue act exchange level. Concern alignment model has been developed to address convergent negotiation fo...

This paper describes a Group Decision and Negotiation Support System for cooperative or non-cooperative argumentative discourses. The system provides agents means of expressing and weighing their individual arguments and preferences, the aim being the selection of a certain choice. It also supports defeasible and qualitative reasoning in the presence of ill-structured information. Argumentation...

This paper presents a model of collaborative discourse which integrates problem-solving, discourse, dialogue initiative and connict resolution. Experimental evidence obtained from an implementation of this theory demonstrates the eeectiveness of dialogue initiative and connict resolution within the model. 1 Motivation Two recently implemented voice dialogue systems utilize the principle that di...

agent-based negotiation is one of the interesting approaches in the field of automated negotiation in the e-commerce world. establishment an automated negotiation needs to develop a mechanism for it and it is obvious that users would accept a mechanism that is reliable alternative for negotiating individual. therefore, the need to developing efficient and reliable agent-based negotiation mechan...

Discourse connectives are words or phrases such as once, since, and on the contrary that explicitly signal the presence of a discourse relation. There are two types of ambiguity that need to be resolved during discourse processing. First, a word can be ambiguous between discourse or non-discourse usage. For example, once can be either a temporal discourse connective or a simply a word meaning “...

the goal of this study was to investigate the kinds of discourse goals that iranian efl learners perceive as the most probable reasons behind the utterance of figurative language, metaphors and similes, with reference to 4 independent variables of figure type (metaphor or simile), tenor concreteness (concrete or abstract), context (list format or story), and modality (oral, written, and both). ...

Collaborations to accomplish common goals necessitate negotiation to share and reach agreement on the beliefs that agents hold as part of the collaboration. Negotiation in communication can be simulated by a series of exchanges in which agents propose, reject, counterpropose or seek supporting information for beliefs they wish to be held mutually. In an arti cial language of negotiation, messag...

A generator based on Combinatory Categorial Grammar using a simple and domain-independent discourse model can be used to direct synthesis of intonation contours for responses to data-base queries, conveying distinctions of contrast and emphasis determined by the discourse model and the state of the knowledge-base. Comments University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Scienc...

The Japanese particle wa is widely considered a marker for topic. This paper presents new evidence that contrary to this general view, wa does not only mark topic, but it also marks items that are simply discourse anaphoric. The evidence comes from the observation that a wa-phrase displays distinct syntactic behaviour depending on whether it is interpreted as a topic or discourse anaphoric. It ...