This article presents the concept and development steps towards a conversational expert system for rhetorical and vocal quality assessment in call center talks. At first the state of the art in quality assessment is discussed. The influencing rhetorical and vocal factors are introduced. In our novel approach, the recognition of vocal factors is modeled by competing classification systems and co...

This study examined the effect of two different authentic topic-familiar rhetorical L2 listening tasks (expository and argumentative) differing in reasoning demand on the listening comprehension scores of a number of Iranian EFL advanced learners. Sixty homogeneous advanced learners were recruited based on their performance on an English Language Proficiency test (Fowler & Coe, 1976). Then they...

This study investigates the prosody of rhetorical questions in German. In an interaction study we examined how speakers use boundary tones, pitch, duration and voice quality to mark syntactically ambiguous questions as rhetorical or information seeking. To this end, speakers produced identical interrogatives (polar and wh questions) in rhetorical and information seeking contexts. The results sh...

The rhetorical theory of argument, if held as the conclusion of an argument, is self-defeating. There are two arguments that it is. First is the quick and dirty argument: the rhetorical theory is that argument quality is adjudged by eliciting conviction, but the case for the theory is not convincing. Second is the process argument: if one has the view that one’s reasons are arranged with the so...

Abstract In this paper, we show that Icelandic uses the phonetic parameters of speaking rate, duration and voice quality (VQ) to distinguish between information-seeking questions (ISQs) rhetorical (RQs). Specifically, durations are longer (speaking rate is slower) nonmodal VQs used more in RQs than ISQs. Our findings for temporal fit with previous studies on prosody various languages. With resp...

When assessing student essays, educators look for the students’ ability to present and pursue well-reasoned and strong arguments. Such scholarly argumentation is often articulated by rhetorical metadiscourse. Educators will be necessarily examining metadiscourse in students’ writing as signals of the intellectual moves that make their reasoning visible. Therefore students and educators could be...

We describe an intelligent agent that provides students with suitable online argumentation strategies and rhetorical methods in a computer-supported collaborative argumentation environment. Computer-based arguments contain many regular patterns that occur with high frequency. Further more, these regular patterns are often related with argumentation strategies. Armed with this knowledge, the int...

The goal of this research was to find a way to extend the capabilities of computers through the processing of language in a more human way, and present applications which demonstrate the power of this method. This research presents a novel approach, Rhetorical Analysis, to solving problems in Natural Language Processing (NLP). The main benefit of Rhetorical Analysis, as opposed to previous appr...

Rhetorical figures, which are frequently applied in advertisements, can add literary flavor to the texts, gratify audiences’ aesthetic needs, and deepen their impression. In advertisement translation, it is very common that the rhetorical figures applied in the original text are replaced with new ones in the translation. This research focuses on rhetorical figures’ function of enhancing audienc...