The SENSEI Annotated Corpus: Human Summaries of Reader Comment Conversations in On-line News

Researchers are beginning to explore how to generate summaries of extended argumentative conversations in social media, such as those found in reader comments in on-line news. To date, however, there has been little discussion of what these summaries should be like and a lack of humanauthored exemplars, quite likely because writing summaries of this kind of interchange is so difficult. In this paper we propose one type of reader comment summary – the conversation overview summary – that aims to capture the key argumentative content of a reader comment conversation. We describe a method we have developed to support humans in authoring conversation overview summaries and present a publicly available corpus – the first of its kind – of news articles plus comment sets, each multiply annotated, according to our method, with conversation overview summaries

The SENSEI Overview of Newspaper Readers’ Comments

Automatic summarization of reader comments in on-line news is a challenging but clearly useful task. Work to date has produced extractive summaries using well-known techniques from other areas of NLP. But do users really want these, and do they support users in realistic tasks? We specify an alternative summary type for reader comments, based on the notions of issues and viewpoints, and demonstrate our user interface to present it. An evaluation to assess how well summarization systems support users in time-limited tasks (identifying issues and characterizing opinions) gives good results for this prototype

What's the issue here?: Task-based evaluation of reader comment summarization systems

Automatic summarization of reader comments in on-line news is an extremely challenging task and a capability for which there is a clear need. Work to date has focussed on producing extractive summaries using well-known techniques imported from other areas of language processing. But are extractive summaries of comments what users really want? Do they support users in performing the sorts of tasks they are likely to want to perform with reader comments? In this paper we address these questions by doing three things. First, we offer a specification of one possible summary type for reader comment, based on an analysis of reader comment in terms of issues and viewpoints. Second, we define a task-based evaluation framework for reader comment summarization that allows summarization systems to be assessed in terms of how well they support users in a time-limited task of identifying issues and characterising opinion on issues in comments. Third, we describe a pilot evaluation in which we used the task-based evaluation framework to evaluate a prototype reader comment clustering and summarization system, demonstrating the viability of the evaluation framework and illustrating the sorts of insight such an evaluation affords

Interaction Mining: Making Business Sense of Customers Conversations through Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis

Via the Web a wealth of information for business research is ready at our fingertips. Analyzing this – unstructured - information, however, can be very difficult. Analytics has become the business buzzword distinguishing traditional competitors from ‘analytics competitors’ who have dramatically boosted their revenues. The latter competitors distinguish themselves through “expert use of statistics and modeling to improve a wide variety of functions” (Davenport, 2006, p. 105). However, not all information lends itself to statistics and models. Actually, most information on the Web is made for, and by, people communicating through ‘rich’ language. This richness of our language is typically missed or not adequately accounted for in (statistical) analytics (e.g. Text-mining) - and so is its real meaning - because it is hidden in semantics rather than form (e.g. syntax). In our efforts of turning unstructured data into structured data, important information – and our ability to distinguish ourselves from competitors - gets lost

Reading and Religion: Reconciling Diverse Reading Patterns and the First Year Composition Classroom

While tolerance is the supposed standard of the first-year composition classroom, the writing patterns and argumentation skills of self-identified Christian students often frustrate teachers and create classroom dissonance and interpersonal divergence. This work looks at what apologetic and devotional texts these students are reading before they enter the classroom and then analyzes these works to see how well their content aligns with Composition I reading and writing requirements. To do this, the study takes information from two very distinct groups: religious leaders of young adults and Composition I instructors. The study begins by surveying religious workers to identify the top text that their youth are reading. Next, it details a focus group interview of Composition I instructors to first identify the specific goals they have for students and then turn the goals into a quantifiable rubric. Finally, the work brings both parts together as the top texts are scored according to the rubric to see if the works these young adults are reading align with the skills promoted by teachers of college writing. It concludes by offering recommendations on meeting areas of need and a sample instructional model to supplement portions where the texts may be lacking

Discourse structure and language technology

This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.An increasing number of researchers and practitioners in Natural Language Engineering face the prospect of having to work with entire texts, rather than individual sentences. While it is clear that text must have useful structure, its nature may be less clear, making it more difficult to exploit in applications. This survey of work on discourse structure thus provides a primer on the bases of which discourse is structured along with some of their formal properties. It then lays out the current state-of-the-art with respect to algorithms for recognizing these different structures, and how these algorithms are currently being used in Language Technology applications. After identifying resources that should prove useful in improving algorithm performance across a range of languages, we conclude by speculating on future discourse structure-enabled technology.Peer Reviewe

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

Matters of Argument: Materiality, Listening, and Practices of Openness in First-Year Writing Classes

This dissertation argues for the value of increased focus on practices of listening in rhetorical education, especially in first-year writing courses. Building on research in listening rhetorics, new materialism, and contemplative pedagogy, the author presents a pedagogical and rhetorical vision for more open argument. Open arguments function with open-heartedness, an open-ethos, openness to listening to Others and the material world, openness to a multiplicity of viewpoints, open-endedness, and openness to productive conflict. The author argues that students can learn to write these more open arguments through a combination of listening to the material world around them, listening to their own bodies, and listening to their interlocutors. These listening practices are explored through a pedagogical self-study that shows how listening to the material world can help writers move beyond the constraints of the thesis-support model into open-ended complexity; explore new materially based metaphors to write less combative deliberative arguments; and use greater awareness of one’s embodied reactions and positionality to listen to and dialogue with others across difference. Advisor: Robert Brook

EGAP Writing 2: Research Writing_2021 Edition

これは2021年度版の教科書です。京都大学の1回生向けEWL（English Writing-Listening) コース受講者は、「全学統一ライティング教科書」(http://hdl.handle.net/2433/266844)のページから、受講年度に対応する教科書をダウンロードしてください。「2021 Sept. (v. 1.78)」へファイルを差し替え(2021/09/01)Stewart, T., LeBlanc, C., Lees, D., McCarthy, T., & Schipper, S. (2021). EGAP writing 2: Research writing. Kyoto University, International Academic Research and Resource Center for Language Education.タイトルに文字追加(2021/12/21)：EGAP Writing 2: Research Writing → EGAP Writing 2: Research Writing_2021 Editio

Tweets from the Campaign Trail

Hailed by many as a game-changer in political communication, Twitter has made its way into election campaigns all around the world. The European Parliamentary elections, taking place simultaneously in 28 countries, give us a unique comparative vision of the way the tool is used by candidates in different national contexts. This volume is the fruit of a research project bringing together scholars from 6 countries, specialised in communication science, media studies, linguistics and computer science. It seeks to characterise the way Twitter was used during the 2014 European election campaign, providing insights into communication styles and strategies observed in different languages and outlining methodological solutions for collecting and analysing political tweets in an electoral context