The use of appropriate rhetorical moves (RMs) and meta-discourse markers (MMs) improve the argumentative and persuasive force of academic texts, such as essays, thesis, seminar papers, and articles. However, authors from different language backgrounds and levels of expertise may use different RMs and MMs when writing in a foreign language. This…

This thesis describes how intellectual boundary spanning can be identified in the written ideas of millions of scholars, and finds that such efforts encounter translational problems which can hinder faculty careers. In particular, the work presented develops textual metrics of intellectual boundary spanning (interdisciplinarity) and field…

Formality has long been of interest in the study of discourse, with periodic discussions of the best measure of formality and the relationship between formality and text categories. In this research, we explored what features predict formality as humans perceive the construct. We categorized a corpus consisting of 1,158 discourse samples published…

In the context of Learning Technologies, the need to be able to assess the learning and domain comprehension in open-ended learner responses has been present in artificial intelligence and education since its beginnings. The advantage of using summaries is that they allow teachers to diagnose comprehension and the amount of information remembered…

Early speech-act theorists studied isolated speech acts, often in terms of single sentences invented by the investigator, an approach that had obvious limitations. It is now known that speech acts ought to be investigated by looking at utterances in their full interactional context. A hierarchical model of the structure of conversation that is…

The experimental program in remedial composition described in this interim report was designed on the assumption that students could best learn to write minimally acceptable compositions by imitating paragraph and essay models which have been divided into a series of incremental steps. The objectives of the program were to develop a heuristic…