Building Knowledge Bases for the Generation of Software Documentation

Automated text generation requires a underlying knowledge base from which to generate, which is often difficult to produce. Software documentation is one domain in which parts of this knowledge base may be derived automatically. In this paper, we describe \drafter, an authoring support tool for generating user-centred software documentation, and in particular, we describe how parts of its required knowledge base can be obtained automatically.Comment: 6 pages, from COLING-9

Some Challenges of Advanced Question-Answering: an Experiment with How-to Questions

PACLIC / The University of the Philippines Visayas Cebu College Cebu City, Philippines / November 20-22, 200

Embedding Self-Regulation Strategy Instruction Into The Genre-Based Writing Curriculum

The research question addressed by this project is: how can teachers embed self-regulation strategies into their writing curriculum for students who struggle to write independently? This project documents the author’s attempt at merging genre-based pedagogy borrowed from Systemic Functional Linguistics with Rebeca Oxford’s Strategic Self-Regulation (S2R) model of learning. The resulting instructional unit, developed with the guidance of Wiggin’s and McTighe’s Understanding by Design framework, teaches secondary students how to write in the genre of persuasion. Additionally, it systematically engages students with opportunities to practice cognitive, affective, and sociocultural-interactive strategies that researchers have found to be characteristic behaviors of effective language learners. The unit includes a unit overview with identified learning goals, a description of formative and summative assessments to be used as evidence of student learning, and a learning plan. It also includes detailed lesson plans for five lessons indented to be spread over a period of 22 days, and a summative assessment

The Rhetoric of Trade Journals: An Analysis of Chemical Engineering Professionalization in Print

In this MQP, I conducted a full genre study of chemical engineering trade journals in order to write an article about rare earth elements for Chemical Engineering Progress, a trade journal published by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). In order to define best practices, I conducted extensive research in the popular and academic spheres of scientific communication and designed and conducted an inductive study of 9 trade journal articles. From this work, I found trade journals exhibited elements of the popular, academic, and textbook genres of scientific communication. I also classified two types of articles: highly technical and overview. The results of this analysis were used to write my article

TOWARD A VISUAL PAIDEIA: VISUAL RHETORIC IN UNDERGRADUATE WRITING PROGRAMS

New media and digital texts of the twenty-first century are generally characterized as rich and dynamic combinations of verbal, visual, and aural elements. Instruction in visual rhetoric in the writing classroom, however, has tended to focus on analysis with far less emphasis on teaching students how to produce multimodal texts. Drawing upon classical rhetorical theory, I propose the development of a visual paideia grounded in the educational goals of the Greco-Roman paideia to incorporate richly balanced instruction in both analysis and production of visual-dominant texts. I approach the development of a visual paideia via examining the current state of visual theory and practice in academic instructional culture. I survey extant theories of visual texts to argue that theories of graphic design, semiotics, and visual culture provide the rich framework needed to inform a visual paideia. I then conduct a writing program and textbook survey to tease out pedagogical practices. Finally, I propose the development of a collection of visual topoi or commonplaces that can be used as a powerful tool of invention in the creation of visual-dominant texts as I demonstrate through several examples of student work

Concept Maps as Sites of Rhetorical Invention: Teaching the Creative Act of Synthesis as a Cognitive Process

Synthesis is one of the most cognitively demanding practices novice writers must undertake, and research demonstrates that first-year students’ synthesis writing practices result in more knowledge telling rather than knowledge creation and transforming. Pedagogies used to teach synthesis often focus on developing text-building strategies but lack explicit instruction on the more cognitively demanding conceptualizing behavior. To explore alternative pedagogies and heuristics, this study looks beyond composition scholarship to incorporate studies in neuroeducation and rhetoric to define synthesis as an ongoing, generative act of cognitive invention, effectively shifting pedagogical focus from text-centered product to student-centered cognitive processes that inform development of synthesized texts (a product). The methods were designed to explore any effects a visual intervention might have on developing student conceptual awareness and reflective practice over time, and whether that transferred into a final researched essay as knowledge transforming. This small-scale exploratory study applies a mixed-methods, design-based methodology to a semester-long intervention in first-year writing classrooms using digital concept maps (DCMAPs) as an ongoing, student-designed space of visualized concept construction. A Control group applied traditional reading-to-write text-based synthesis instruction and practice, while the Intervention group used DCMAPs to enact a prolonged, visualized and reflective practice of active construction of associations, relationships, and structural knowledge building. The DCMAP platform affordances positioned students as knowledge designers enacting creative / constructive processes, an approach based on neuroscience research on patterning and visualization. Intervention data includes reflective journals, narrated mapping process reflections, digital concept map images and construction processes, and a final researched essay that required synthesis of source ideas. Because of the exploratory nature of the study, results are not framed as cause-effect but as correlational possibilities that suggest inventional acts of visually creating connections and labeling them using rhetorically-based associational concepts lead to generative learning behaviors. Results suggest a number of possibilities for future iterations and research, as well as implications for our field’s approach to the teaching of synthesis