From Monologue to Dialogue: Natural Language Generation in OVIS

This paper describes how a language generation system that was originally designed for monologue generation, has been adapted for use in the OVIS spoken dialogue system. To meet the requirement that in a dialogue, the system's utterances should make up a single, coherent dialogue turn, several modifications had to be made to the system. The paper also discusses the influence of dialogue context on information status, and its consequences for the generation of referring expressions and accentuation

How Helpdesk Agents Help Clients

Helpdesks are an important channel for supporting users of technical products and software. This study analyses some phenomena in telephone helpdesk calls, using conversational analysis as a methodological and theoretical framework. Helpdesk calls are characterized by the common goal of the helpdesk agent and the client to understand and solve the client's problem with a particular technical device or with computer software. Both parties cooperate in a complex manner to define and diagnose the problem, and to solve it. The paper identifies the typical structure of a helpdesk call and describes a number of strategies that the participants use to make the call successful

Linguistics and LIS: A Research Agenda

Linguistics and Library and Information Science (LIS) are both interdisciplinary fields that draws from areas such as languages, psychology, sociology, cognitive science, computer science, anthropology, education, and management. The theories and methods of linguistic research can have significant explanatory power for LIS. This article presents a research agenda for LIS that proposes the use of linguistic analysis methods, including discourse analysis, typology, and genre theory

Directional adposition use in English, Swedish and Finnish

Directional adpositions such as to the left of describe where a Figure is in relation to a Ground. English and Swedish directional adpositions refer to the location of a Figure in relation to a Ground, whether both are static or in motion. In contrast, the Finnish directional adpositions edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) solely describe the location of a moving Figure in relation to a moving Ground (Nikanne, 2003). When using directional adpositions, a frame of reference must be assumed for interpreting the meaning of directional adpositions. For example, the meaning of to the left of in English can be based on a relative (speaker or listener based) reference frame or an intrinsic (object based) reference frame (Levinson, 1996). When a Figure and a Ground are both in motion, it is possible for a Figure to be described as being behind or in front of the Ground, even if neither have intrinsic features. As shown by Walker (in preparation), there are good reasons to assume that in the latter case a motion based reference frame is involved. This means that if Finnish speakers would use edellä (in front of) and jäljessä (behind) more frequently in situations where both the Figure and Ground are in motion, a difference in reference frame use between Finnish on one hand and English and Swedish on the other could be expected. We asked native English, Swedish and Finnish speakers’ to select adpositions from a language specific list to describe the location of a Figure relative to a Ground when both were shown to be moving on a computer screen. We were interested in any differences between Finnish, English and Swedish speakers. All languages showed a predominant use of directional spatial adpositions referring to the lexical concepts TO THE LEFT OF, TO THE RIGHT OF, ABOVE and BELOW. There were no differences between the languages in directional adpositions use or reference frame use, including reference frame use based on motion. We conclude that despite differences in the grammars of the languages involved, and potential differences in reference frame system use, the three languages investigated encode Figure location in relation to Ground location in a similar way when both are in motion. Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneux’s question: Crosslingiuistic evidence. In P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel & M.F. Garrett (Eds.) Language and Space (pp.109-170). Massachusetts: MIT Press. Nikanne, U. (2003). How Finnish postpositions see the axis system. In E. van der Zee & J. Slack (Eds.), Representing direction in language and space. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Walker, C. (in preparation). Motion encoding in language, the use of spatial locatives in a motion context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lincoln, Lincoln. United Kingdo

Using corpus methods to investigate classroom interaction and teacher discourse in special educational needs (SEN) classrooms: an investigation of methodological possibilities

This thesis uses corpus methods to investigate classroom interaction in SEN classrooms. Typically research in the field of teacher talk takes a pedagogic or psychological perspective and has therefore utilised experimental or observational data on a much smaller scale than this corpus-based analysis. The advantages of such a corpus analysis is considered, including the benefits of a larger and empirical data set and automated analyses. The SEN Classrooms Corpus created for purpose of this study amounts to 52,813 words of spoken teacher-pupil interaction. Data comes from 16 lessons from two classes with two different teachers in a single SEN school over a two-year period. All interactions involve at least one teacher and groups of between three and nine pupils engaging in literacy classes with a focus upon shared reading. As features of teacher discourse were often only vaguely defined by function in the relevant literature, a methodological process was adapted to translate these into automatic corpus queries. First, definitions were combined with definitions from contemporary English grammars in order to provide a linguistic form for each teacher discourse feature. These forms were then translated into CQP advanced syntax queries, allowing us to retrieval examples of each feature from the SEN Classrooms Corpus. Analyses in this thesis focuses upon the four most common features of teacher discourse as identified in the literature and based upon the pilot study (Smith, 2015): questions, directives, augmentative and alternative communication and feedback. Following the creation of queries, corpus methods including frequency, distribution and concordancing were used in order to assess both how often and in what contexts individual features were used within the SEN Classrooms Corpus. This, in turn, allows us to investigate exactly how teacher discourse occurs within these classrooms. This thesis provides three major conclusions regarding the use of corpus methods to assess teacher scaffolding in SEN classrooms. First, it demonstrates how a corpus of such interactive data might be created, including important methodological considerations. Second, it provides a framework by which we might move from ill-defined features in literature to complete corpus queries that aid automated corpus analyses. Finally, the use of this unique corpus and this set of methods and queries allows us to investigate how different features of teacher discourse are used by teachers within the SEN Classrooms Corpus, including whether these uses confirm or challenge the findings of previous empirical research

Akadēmiskā personāla angļu valodas komunikatīvās kompetences modelis

Promocijas darba „Akadēmiskā personāla angļu valodas komunikatīvās kompetences modelis” aktualitāti nosaka nepieciešamība augstskolām nodrošināt studiju procesa internacionalizāciju, kas nav iespējams bez akadēmiskā personāla angļu valodas zināšanām un prasmēm pasniegšanai multikulturālā vidē. Darbā ir apkopotas teorētiskās atziņas un veikts empīrisks pētījums par mutvārdu akadēmisko diskursu, lekcijas žanru, komunikatīvo valodas kompetenci, izmantojot kvalitatīvas un kvantitatīvas pētniecības metodes. Darbā tiek secināts, ka spēja lasīt veiksmīgas lekcijas angļu valodā ārvalstu studentiem lielā mērā ir atkarīga no akadēmiskā personāla angļu valodas komunikatīvās valodas kompetences, kas ietver visas sešas komunikatīvās valodas kompetences sastāvdaļas, kuras apskatītas šajā promocijas darbā. Atslēgvārdi: augstākā izglītība, lekcijas žanrs, mutvārdu akadēmiskais diskurss, angļu valodas komunikatīvās kompetences modelisThe novelty of the Doctoral thesis „Communicative English Language Competency Framework for the Academic Personnel” stems from the necessity of the academic personnel to ensure the internationalisation of the study process in the academia, which is impossible without the appropriate level of English language competency and skills necessary for working in the intercultural environment. The author summarized the theoretical findings and conducted an empirical research on spoken academic discourse, genre of an academic lecture, communicative language competences, using quantitative and qualitative research methods. It was concluded that a content lecture in English targeting the intentional audience is realized successfully when all six components of the communicative English language competence, described by the author, are coherent and are activated by the academic personnel. Keywords: tertiary education, lecture genre, spoken academic discourse, communicative English language competency framewor