This paper describes the linguistic part of a system called PROVERB, which transforms, abstracts, and verbalizes machine-found proofs into formated texts. Linguistically, the architecture of PROVERB follows most application oriented systems, and is a pipe-lined control of three components. Its macroplanner linearizes a proof and plans mediating communicative acts by employing a combination of hierarchical planning and focus-guided navigation. The microplanner

This paper presents empirical results comparing spoken and keyboard communication. It is shown that speakers attempt to achieve more detailed goals in giving instructions than do users of keyboards. One specific kind of fine-grained communicative act, a request that the hearer identify the referent of a noun phrase, is shown to dominate spoken instruction-giving discourse, but is nearly absent from keyboard discourse. Most important, these requests are only achieved "indirectly". - through utterances whose surface forms do not explicitly convey the speakers' intent. A plan-based theory of communication is shown to uncover the speakers' intentions underlying many cases of indirect identification requests found in the corpus, once an action for referent identification has been posited. In so doing, the theory demonstrates how intent (or plan) recognition can be applied in reasoning about the use of a description. As a consequence of this approach, it is shown that the conditions on the planning of successful identification requests account for Searle's conditions on the act of referring. It is concluded that intent recognition will need to be a central focus for pragmatics/discourse components of future speech understanding systems, and that computational linguistics needs to develop formalisms for reasoning about speakers' use of descriptions

In this paper we describe the architecture of the ILEX system, which supports opportunistic text generation. In web-based text generation, the system cannot plan the entire multi-page discourse because the user's browsing path is unpredictable. For this reason, the system must be ready opportunistically to take advantage of whatever path the user chooses. We describe both the nature of opportunism in ILEX's museum domain, and then show how ILEX has been designed to function in this environment. The architecture presented addresses opportunism in both content determination and sentence planning.

This paper deals with the reference choices involved in the generation of argumentative text. Since a natual segmentation of discourse into attentional spaces is needed to carry out this task, this paper first proposes an architecture for natural language generation that combines hierarchical planning and focus-guided navigation, a work in its own right. While hierarchical planning spans out an attentional hierarchy of the discourse produced, local navigation fills details into the primitive discourse spaces. The usefulness of this architecture actually goes beyond the particular domain of application for which it is developed. A piece of argumentative text such as the proof of a mathematical theorem conveys a sequence of derivations. For each step of derivation, the premises derived in the previous context and the inference method (such as the application of a particular theorem or definition) must be made clear. Although not restricted to nominal phrases, our reference decisions are similar to those concerning nominal subsequent referring expressions. Based on the work of Reichmann, this paper presents a discourse theory that handles reference choices by taking into account both textual distance as well as the attentional hierarchy.

Computer-based media place new demands on language which can promote variations in language use (cf. Halliday, 1990). Electronic mail has assumed functions and formal features associated with spoken language as well as formal writing (Davis & Brewer, 1997; Maynor, 1994; Murray, 1996). This has implications for language instructors: If electronic mail does engender features of both written and spoken language, it is questionable that electronic mail writing will improve academic writing abilities. The present study attempts to provide insights into this issue. Non-native students in an intermediate pre-academic ESL course responded to writing prompts using electronic mail and word processing. Their writing was examined for (1) differences in use of cohesive features (Halliday, 1967; Halliday & Hasan, 1976), (2) length of text produced in each medium, and (3) differences in text-initial contextualization. Results indicate no obvious differences between students ' electronic mail and word-processed writing. However, the electronic mail texts were significantly shorter than the word-processed texts, and text-initial contextualization was more prominent in the word-processed than in the electronic mail texts. The findings raise the question of whether electronic mail benefits students in terms of academic writing development.

Abstract not found

What’s in a laugh? Humour, jokes and laughter in the conversational corpus of the BNC

F.S.R-FNRS et Université catholique de Louvain In the last thirty years, numerous linguists have stressed the discourse functions of adverbials. More specifically, sentence-initial temporal and spatial adverbials are often seen as "grammatical signals" that highlight the beginning of a new discourse unit for which they provide the setting (Brown & Yule,

This study had two purposes: The first was to investigate the effects of instruction on pragmatic acquisition in writing. In particular, the focus was on the use of hedging devices in the academic writing of learners of English as a second language. The second purpose was to discover whether this training transferred to a less-planned, less-formal, computer-mediated type of writing, namely a Daedalus interaction. Graduate students enrolled in an academic writing class for non-native Englishspeakers received treatment designed to increase their metapragmatic awareness and improve their ability to use hedging devices. Data were compared to a control group that did not receive the treatment. The treatment group showed statistically significant increases in the use of hedging devices in the research papers and in the computer-mediated discussion.

Abstract not found