Introducing a corpus of conversational stories. Construction and annotation of the Narrative Corpus

Although widely seen as critical both in terms of its frequency and its social significance as a prime means of encoding and perpetuating moral stance and configuring self and identity, conversational narrative has received little attention in corpus linguistics. In this paper we describe the construction and annotation of a corpus that is intended to advance the linguistic theory of this fundamental mode of everyday social interaction: the Narrative Corpus (NC). The NC contains narratives extracted from the demographically-sampled sub-corpus of the British National Corpus (BNC) (XML version). It includes more than 500 narratives, socially balanced in terms of participant sex, age, and social class. We describe the extraction techniques, selection criteria, and sampling methods used in constructing the NC. Further, we describe four levels of annotation implemented in the corpus: speaker (social information on speakers), text (text Ids, title, type of story, type of embedding etc.), textual components (pre-/post-narrative talk, narrative, and narrative-initial/final utterances), and utterance (participation roles, quotatives and reporting modes). A brief rationale is given for each level of annotation, and possible avenues of research facilitated by the annotation are sketched out

Metadiscourse Tagging in Academic Lectures

This thesis presents a study into the nature and structure of academic lectures, with a special focus on metadiscourse phenomena. Metadiscourse refers to a set of linguistics expressions that signal specific discourse functions such as the Introduction: “Today we will talk about...” and Emphasising: “This is an important point”. These functions are important because they are part of lecturers’ strategies in understanding of what happens in a lecture. The knowledge of their presence and identity could serve as initial steps toward downstream applications that will require functional analysis of lecture content such as a browser for lectures archives, summarisation, or an automatic minute-taker for lectures. One challenging aspect for metadiscourse detection and classification is that the set of expressions are semi-fixed, meaning that different phrases can indicate the same function. To that end a four-stage approach is developed to study metadiscourse in academic lectures. Firstly, a corpus of metadiscourse for academic lectures from Physics and Economics courses is built by adapting an existing scheme that describes functional-oriented metadiscourse categories. Second, because producing reference transcripts is a time-consuming task and prone to some errors due to the manual efforts required, an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system is built specifically to produce transcripts of lectures. Since the reference transcripts lack time-stamp information, an alignment system is applied to the reference to be able to evaluate the ASR system. Then, a model is developed using Support Vector Machines (SVMs) to classify metadiscourse tags using both textual and acoustical features. The results show that n-grams are the most inductive features for the task; however, due to data sparsity the model does not generalise for unseen n-grams. This limits its ability to solve the variation issue in metadiscourse expressions. Continuous Bag-of-Words (CBOW) provide a promising solution as this can capture both the syntactic and semantic similarities between words and thus is able to solve the generalisation issue. However, CBOW ignores the word order completely, something which is very important to be retained when classifying metadiscourse tags. The final stage aims to address the issue of sequence modelling by developing a joint CBOW and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model. CNNs can work with continuous features such as word embedding in an elegant and robust fashion by producing a fixed-size feature vector that is able to identify indicative local information for the tagging task. The results show that metadiscourse tagging using CNNs outperforms the SVMs model significantly even on ASR outputs, owing to its ability to predict a sequence of words that is more representative for the task regardless of its position in the sentence. In addition, the inclusion of other features such as part-of-speech (POS) tags and prosodic cues improved the results further. These findings are consistent in both disciplines. The final contribution in this thesis is to investigate the suitability of using metadiscourse tags as discourse features in the lecture structure segmentation model, despite the fact that the task is approached as a classification model and most of the state-of-art models are unsupervised. In general, the obtained results show remarkable improvements over the state-of-the-art models in both disciplines

Strategies for integrating information literacy and academic literacy: Helping undergraduate students make the most of scholarly articles.

Paper presented at the 33rd Annual IATUL [International Association of Scientific and Technological University Libraries] Conference

A Multimodal Approach to Metadiscourse as an Organizational Tool in Lectures

This thesis explores the uses of organizational metadiscourse in lectures from a multimodal perspective, thus providing a holistic view of its use. Moreover, this study explores how the use of organizational metadiscourse, both at a linguistic and at non-verbal level, is influenced by the lecturing style chosen by the lecturers (conversational, rhetorical or reading styles).Esta tesis explora los usos del metadiscurso organizativo en clases universitarias desde una perspectiva multimodal que permite obtener una visión holística del mismo. Además, se describe como el discurso organizativo es influenciado tanto a nivel lingüístico como a nivel no verbal por el estilo de enseñanza del profesorado (conversacional, retórico o lector).Programa de Doctorat en Llengües Aplicades, Literatura i Traducci

Annotation Studio: Multimedia Annotation for Students

Annotation Studio is a web-based annotation application that integrates a powerful set of textual interpretation tools behind an interface that makes using those tools intuitive for undergraduates. Building on students’ new media literacies, this Open-source application develops traditional humanistic skills including close reading, textual analysis, persuasive writing, and critical thinking. Initial features of the Annotation Studio prototype, supported by an NEH Start-Up Grant, include aligned multi-media annotation of written texts, user-defined sharing of annotations, and grouping of annotation by self-defined tags to support interpretation and argument development. The fully developed application will support annotation of image, video and audio documents; annotation visualization; export of texts with annotations; and a media repository. We will also identify best practices among faculty using Annotation Studio in a broad range of humanities classes across the country

The Affordances of Social Annotation in the Online Writing Classroom: A Community of Inquiry Analysis

Social annotation (SA) is a genre of web-based applications that allow users to annotate texts and to see and respond to annotations others have written. To explore the potential of SA for teaching writing online, findings from twelve empirical studies of SA in education were analyzed through the lens of the Community of Inquiry framework. Results indicate that SA can contribute to cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence in online writing instruction. SA supports collaborative understanding and unpacking of texts. Students can identify and discuss main ideas, claims, rhetorical moves, evidence, etc. They can ask and answer questions. The demands of articulating their views and comparing them to those of others cause students to become aware of their thought processes, a metacognitive development. Pedagogical strategies such as highlighting important concepts and seeding expert annotations can focus attention and scaffold learning. SA can promote the development of community as students collaborate and encourage one another. Teachers can plan and monitor SA activities aligned with learning outcomes. The findings provide insights to guide incorporation of SA in online writing instruction

How should the higher education workforce adapt to advancements in technology for teaching and learning?

In a time of change, higher education is in the position of having to adapt to external conditions created by widespread adoption of popular technologies such as social media, social networking services and mobile devices. For faculty members, there must be opportunities for concrete experiences capable of generating a personal conviction that a given technology is worth using and an understanding of the contexts in which it is best used. The paper examines approaches to educational professional development at The Open University, including recent initiatives related to faculty development in relation to mobile learning. The paper reflects on what can be learnt from these experiences and proposes a lifelong learning perspective which can help the higher education workforce to adapt. Faculty members have to commit to lifelong learning, remembering that ‘professional role model’ to students is one of the main roles of the teacher