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Classical SDRT (Asher and Lascarides, 2003) discussed essential features of dialogue like adjacency pairs or corrections and up-dating. Recent work in SDRT (Asher, 2002, 2005) aims at the description of natural dialogue. We use this work to model situated communication, i.e. dialogue, in which sub-sentential utterances and gestures (pointing and grasping) are used as conventional modes of communication. We show that in addition to cognitive modelling in SDRT, capturing mental states and speech-act related goals, special postulates are needed to extract meaning out of contexts. Gestural meaning anchors Discourse Referents in contextually given domains. Both sorts of meaning are fused with the meaning of fragments to get at fully developed dialogue moves. This task accomplished, the standard SDRT machinery, tagged SDRSs, rhetorical relations, the up-date mechanism, and the Maximize Discourse Coherence constraint generate coherent structures. In sum, meanings from different verbal and non-verbal sources are assembled using extended SDRT to form coherent wholes.
We present a formal analysis of iconic coverbal gesture. Our model describes the incomplete meaning of gesture that’s derivable from its form, and the pragmatic reasoning that yields a more specific interpretation. Our formalism builds on established models of discourse interpretation to capture key insights from the descriptive literature on gesture: synchronous speech and gesture express a single thought, but while the form of iconic gesture is an important clue to its interpretation, the content of gesture can be resolved only by linking it to its context.
In two experiments, many annotators marked antecedents for discourse deixis as unconstrained regions of text. The experiments show that annotators do converge on the identity of these text regions, though much of what they do can be captured by a simple model. Demonstrative pronouns are more likely than definite descriptions to be marked with discourse antecedents. We suggest that our methodology is suitable for the systematic study of discourse deixis.
We present a new analysis of illocutionary forces in dialogue. We analyze them as complex conversational moves involving two dimensions: what Speaker commits herself to and what she calls on Addressee to perform. We start from the analysis of speech acts such as confirmation requests or whimperatives, and extend the analysis to seemingly simple speech acts, such as statements and queries. Then, we show how to integrate our proposal in the framework of the Grammar for Conversation (Ginzburg, to app.), which is adequate for modelling agents' information states and how they get updated.
Claiming that cross-speaker "but" can signal correction in dialogue, we start by describing the types of corrections "but" can communicate by focusing on the Speech Act (SA) communicated in the previous turn and address the ways in which "but" can correct what is communicated. We address whether "but" corrects the proposition, the direct SA or the discourse relation communicated in the previous turn. We will also briefly address other relations signalled by cross-turn "but". After presenting a typology of the situations "but" can correct, we will address how these corrections can be modelled in the Information State model of dialogue, motivating this work by showing how it can be used to potentially avoid misunderstandings. We wrap up by showing how the model presented here updates beliefs in the Information State representation of the dialogue and can be used to facilitate response deliberation.
An account is presented of the focus properties, common ground effect and dialogue behaviour of the accented German discourse marker "doch" and the accented sentence negation "nicht". It is argued that "doch" and "nicht" evoke as a focus alternative the logical complement of the proposition expressed by the sentence in which they occur, and that an analysis in terms of contrastive focus accounts for their effect on the common ground and their function in dialogue.
We present an analysis of student language input in a corpus of tutoring dialogue in the domain of symbolic differentiation. Our focus on procedural tutoring makes the dialogue comparable to collaborative problem-solving (CPS). Existing CPS models describe the process of negotiating plans and goals, which also fits procedural tutoring. However, we provide a classification of student utterances and corpus annotation which shows that approximately 28% of non-trivial student language in this corpus is not accounted for by existing models, and addresses other functions, such as evaluating past actions or correcting mistakes. Our analysis can be used as a foundation for improving models of tutoring dialogue.
In semi-arid savannas, unsustainable land use can lead to degradation of entire landscapes, e.g. in the form of shrub encroachment. This leads to habitat loss and is assumed to reduce species diversity. In BIOTA phase 1, we investigated the effects of land use on population dynamics on farm scale. In phase 2 we scale up to consider the whole regional landscape consisting of a diverse mosaic of farms with different historic and present land use intensities. This mosaic creates a heterogeneous, dynamic pattern of structural diversity at a large spatial scale. Understanding how the region-wide dynamic land use pattern affects the abundance of animal and plant species requires the integration of processes on large as well as on small spatial scales. In our multidisciplinary approach, we integrate information from remote sensing, genetic and ecological field studies as well as small scale process models in a dynamic region-wide simulation tool. <hr> Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für Musterdynamik und Angewandte Fernerkundung Workshop vom 9. - 10. Februar 2006.