This paper describes recent advances on the Text2Dialogue system we are currently developing. Our system enables automatic transformation of monological text into a dialogue. The dialogue is then “acted out” by virtual agents, using synthetic speech and gestures. In this paper, we focus on the monologue-to-dialogue transformation, and describe how it uses textual coherence relations to map text...

With the development of Bakhtin's theory of polyphony in literary criticism, the kind of attitude to literary texts has changed, and according to the needs of modern society, this discourse became the focus of attention of thinkers and literary theorists. Polyphony, with its own meta-lingual potentials, brings with it a new approach, a rethinking of the audience, so that the reader can have a n...

Traditional accounts of language processing suggest that monologue--presenting and listening to speeches--should be more straightforward than dialogue--holding a conversation. This is clearly not the case. We argue that conversation is easy because of an interactive processing mechanism that leads to the alignment of linguistic representations between partners. Interactive alignment occurs via ...

On the basis of a new corpus of short “microtexts” with parallel manual annotations, we study the mapping from discourse structure (in terms of Rhetorical Structure Theory, RST) to argumentation structure. We first perform a qualitative analysis and discuss our findings on correspondence patterns. Then we report on experiments with deriving argumentation structure from the (gold) RST trees, whe...

The observation that discourse is more than a mere sequence of utterances or sentences amounts to a truism. But what follows from this? In what way does the ”value added” arise when segments of discourse are juxtaposed how does hierarchical structure originate from a linearized discourse? While many discourse phenomena apply to dialogue and monologue alike, this tutorial will center its attenti...