Assessing relevance

This paper advances an approach to relevance grounded on patterns of material inference called argumentation schemes, which can account for the reconstruction and the evaluation of relevance relations. In order to account for relevance in different types of dialogical contexts, pursuing also non-cognitive goals, and measuring the scalar strength of relevance, communicative acts are conceived as dialogue moves, whose coherence with the previous ones or the context is represented as the conclusion of steps of material inferences. Such inferences are described using argumentation schemes and are evaluated by considering 1) their defeasibility, and 2) the acceptability of the implicit premises on which they are based. The assessment of both the relevance of an utterance and the strength thereof depends on the evaluation of three interrelated factors: 1) number of inferential steps required; 2) the types of argumentation schemes involved; and 3) the implicit premises required

Achieving mutual understanding in intercultural project partnerships : co-operation, self-orientation, and fragility

Communication depends on cooperation in at least the following way: In order to be successful, communicative behavior needs to be adjusted to the general world knowledge, abilities, and interests of the hearer, and the hearer's success in figuring out the message and responding to it needs to be informed by assumptions about the communicator's informative intentions, personal goals, and communicative abilities. In other words, interlocutors cooperate by coordinating their actions in order to fulfill their communicative intentions. This minimal assumption about cooperativeness must in one way or another be built into the foundations of any plausible inferential model of human communication. However, the communication process is also influenced to a greater or lesser extent, whether intentionally and consciously or unintentionally and unconsciously, by the participants' orientation toward, or preoccupation with, their own concerns, so their behavior may easily fall short of being as cooperative as is required for achieving successful communication

Discourse network analysis: policy debates as dynamic networks

Political discourse is the verbal interaction between political actors. Political actors make normative claims about policies conditional on each other. This renders discourse a dynamic network phenomenon. Accordingly, the structure and dynamics of policy debates can be analyzed with a combination of content analysis and dynamic network analysis. After annotating statements of actors in text sources, networks can be created from these structured data, such as congruence or conflict networks at the actor or concept level, affiliation networks of actors and concept stances, and longitudinal versions of these networks. The resulting network data reveal important properties of a debate, such as the structure of advocacy coalitions or discourse coalitions, polarization and consensus formation, and underlying endogenous processes like popularity, reciprocity, or social balance. The added value of discourse network analysis over survey-based policy network research is that policy processes can be analyzed from a longitudinal perspective. Inferential techniques for understanding the micro-level processes governing political discourse are being developed

Temporal Inferences in Conversation

Within this article, I explore how coproductions (expansions made by a second speaker upon a previous utterance) and questions regarding prior utterances work to verbalize inferences regarding the temporal information in spoken German conversation. While questions regarding prior utterances and coproductions are traditionally understood to have different communicative functions (signaling understanding/ misunderstanding; turn taking) to coproductions, empirical data shows how these expression types enable the speaker to gradually verbalize different strengths of assumption about details of the previous turn. These two expression types are not a dichotomy, but a continuum

The Cradle of Humanity: A Psychological and Phenomenological Perspective

We present an account of the evolutionary development of the experiences of empathy that marked the beginning of morality and art. We argue that aesthetic and moral capacities provided an important foundation for later epistemic developments. The distinction between phenomenal consciousness and attention is discussed, and a role for phenomenology in cognitive archeology is justified-critical sources of evidence used in our analysis are based on the archeological record. We claim that what made our species unique was a form of meditative and empathic thinking that made large-scale human cooperation possible through pre-linguistic, empathic communication. A critical aspect of this proposal is that the transformation that led to the dawn of our species was not initially driven by semantic or epistemic factors, although clearly, these factors increased the gap between us and other species dramatically later on. Our proposal suggests that recent philosophy of mind and psychology might have "epistemicized" phenomenal consciousness too much by construing it in terms of semantic content rather than by describing it in terms of empathic and meditative thinking. Instead of the prevailing approach, we favor the type of subjectivity that is fundamentally "other-involving" as essential, because on our account, a necessary condition for subjectivity is the empathic understanding of other individuals' psychology, not through inference or judgment, but through immediate conscious engagement

Inférences réflexives dans la publicité

Advertisements are so ubiquitous nowadays that capturing the addressee’s attention and maintaining it long enough for them to be fully processed have become fundamental objectives for advertisers. Employing specific strategies in the design of the advertisement contributes efficiently to achieving these goals, getting the audience not only to attend the stimulus but also to process it in certain ways favourable for the advertiser. We argue that Relevance theory, an approach to communication built on a massively modular view of cognition, offers the right tools to explain the nature of the interpretative processes in verbal comprehension. Knowledge of the relevance-based reflexive inferential procedures involved in utterance interpretation allows advertisers to foresee the addressee’s processing behaviour, giving them the possibility to control it in a such a way that the intended interpretative effects are achieved in the desired way

Improving QED-Tutrix by Automating the Generation of Proofs

The idea of assisting teachers with technological tools is not new. Mathematics in general, and geometry in particular, provide interesting challenges when developing educative softwares, both in the education and computer science aspects. QED-Tutrix is an intelligent tutor for geometry offering an interface to help high school students in the resolution of demonstration problems. It focuses on specific goals: 1) to allow the student to freely explore the problem and its figure, 2) to accept proofs elements in any order, 3) to handle a variety of proofs, which can be customized by the teacher, and 4) to be able to help the student at any step of the resolution of the problem, if the need arises. The software is also independent from the intervention of the teacher. QED-Tutrix offers an interesting approach to geometry education, but is currently crippled by the lengthiness of the process of implementing new problems, a task that must still be done manually. Therefore, one of the main focuses of the QED-Tutrix' research team is to ease the implementation of new problems, by automating the tedious step of finding all possible proofs for a given problem. This automation must follow fundamental constraints in order to create problems compatible with QED-Tutrix: 1) readability of the proofs, 2) accessibility at a high school level, and 3) possibility for the teacher to modify the parameters defining the "acceptability" of a proof. We present in this paper the result of our preliminary exploration of possible avenues for this task. Automated theorem proving in geometry is a widely studied subject, and various provers exist. However, our constraints are quite specific and some adaptation would be required to use an existing prover. We have therefore implemented a prototype of automated prover to suit our needs. The future goal is to compare performances and usability in our specific use-case between the existing provers and our implementation.Comment: In Proceedings ThEdu'17, arXiv:1803.0072

"Implicature-Laden" Elicitations in Talk Radio Shows

Indirect elicitations in talk radio programmes on BBC Radio are not uncommon, notwithstanding, misunderstanding between the host and his conversational partner is not frequent. Investigating some of the reasons this paper focuses on how the socio-cultural and cognitive factors of the context interweave in discourse. The author suggests that valid interpretation and appropriate response to inferred elicitations can be best explained within the framework of Relevance Theory, and more specifically, with the presumption of accessibility of schemas obtained from the cognitive environment of the discourse partners. Through examples of empirical research the paper aims to reveal how the mutual knowledge of the participants controls discourse via the mental processes occurring in the interaction of two minds