Transcript Slide 1

Computational
Models of
Discourse Analysis
Carolyn Penstein Rosé
Language Technologies Institute/
Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Warm-Up Discussion
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There definitely is a content
difference
between with
male and
female
Analogy
educational
research:
blogs in this corpus
Pretest score always accounts for most of the
The question is whether there are
variance
in posttest scores.
also stylistic
differences
If you don’t
control
for pretest score (by using it
Typical findings
from genre
analysis:
a covariate
your comparisons of posttest)
women as
hedge
more, use in
more
indicators
of involvement,
and speak
you
frequently can’t
see a meaningful difference
less formally
between conditions.

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These
patterns
areyou
known
be
But
when
dotocontrol
detectable through POS n-grams
for it, you frequently
can.
But is there something for
It almost
variance
Engagement
here?always explains much less* What
would
thanshow
pretest
However, you can
see
youstill
expect
If women
more score.
involvement,
involvement
wouldn’t
you effect
expect itsizes
to showrelated
up in
large
to other factors.
to look like?
Engagement like features?
 What would you look for?

Now read the excerpt from
the Herring article
Does that change
your view at all on
the extent to which
Engagement is relevant?
Question about Assignment
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I also think that some sort of bootstrapping
may be useful for finding clusters of related
words, and this time we have extra data
that we could use. Would it be acceptable
to use this data in the unlabelled form?
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Yes!
Can you explain the difference
between these three sentences:
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They claimed that he is a stellar PhD
student.
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They stated that he is a stellar PhD
student.
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They demonstrated that he is a stellar PhD
student.
How is “really” functioning in this
passage, and what does that
mean for Engagement oriented
feature extraction?
Heteroglossia vs. Hedging
* What is your
definition of a
hedge? Is
hedging the only
function of
Engagement?
Engagement
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Already established: Positioning a
proposition
 But
can it also be primarily positioning between
people?
 Patterns of positioning propositions as having
the same or different alignment between
speaker and hearer could do this
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Is positioning in communication always
positioning by means of propositional
content?
Gee vs. SFL
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Heteroglossia is like a
tapestry

Gee was referring to the
individual colored threads
being woven together
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The subtance of the perspective
Martin and White are referring
to what holds the threads
together
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More focus on alignment versus
disalignment
Connection between
Heteroglossia and Attitude
But is this
really
different from
a disclaim?
And is this
really
different from
a proclaim?
Student Comment
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I agree with what David said in class on
Monday--that heterogloss, as defined in the
reading, sounds much more like hedging
than what Gee's and what I imagine
Bakhtin's concepts of it were. And as such,
I believe hedging is a much more effective
tool in showing generational or
occupational differences rather than gender
differences.
Accommodation
by pointing out the inflation of Saddam’s body count by
neocons in an effort to further vilify him and thus further justify
our invasion we are not DEFENDING saddam....just pointing
out how neocons rarely let facts get in the way of a good war.
So wait, how many do you think Saddam killed or oppressed?
You’re trying to make him look better than he actually was. You’re
the one inflating the casualties we’ve caused! Seriously, what
estimates (with a link) are there that we’ve killed over 100,000
civilians. Not some crack pot geocities page either.
Other views of positioning
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From Tannen’s
Framing in Discourse
 Words
that sound like
a role
 The substance of that
role – in the Gee
sense
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In this case, speaking
the words shows
alignment because
you use them as
though they are your
own
Connections
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Alignment and Solidarity (positioning
between people)
 Can
you think of other indicators of solidarity
Personal pronouns
 Accommodation
 Friendly language
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Factivity (positioning between people and
propositions)
I
regret eating that chocolate
 Is this heteroglossic?
How would an Engagement style analysis compare/relate to
the LIWC analysis we discussed last time?
Student Comment
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Iris: I think that not only may it sound sexist
to hypothesize about what people of a
certain gender talk like but also may the
way people talk be more indicative of
where they are from.
How would you expect an Engagement style
analysis to relate to personality?
•What effect would
you expect to see
on conversations?
•Are these
necessarily
connected?
Freshman Engineering Study
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131 Freshman engineering students
worked in groups of 3 or 4 to design
a better wrench
 Applying
principles related to stress
and leverage
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Procedure
 Tutorial
on computer aided engineering
 Pretest
 Collaborative
design activity
 Posttest
 Questionnaire
Heteroglossia Manipulation
Social Manipulation
Tutor Agent Design
Tutor
ConcertChat
Server
ConcertChatActor
S95
ConcertChatListener
Tutor
ProgressDetector
MessageFilter
PresenceFilter
Tutor
AnnotationFilter
IntroductionsManag
er
IntroductionsActor
SocialControlle
r
PlanExecutor
RequestDetecto
r
PromptingManage TutoringManag
r
er
PromptingActor
S89
ActivityDetector
TutoringActor
Kumar, R. & Rosé, C. P. (2011). Architecture for building
Conversational Agents that support Collaborative Learning, IEEE
Transactions on Learning Technologies special issue on Intelligent
and Innovative Support Systems for Computer Supported
Collaborative Learning
T.TakingCoordinator
OutputCoordinator
DiscourseMemory
One last thing on this topic, Does
more (or less) stress in a wrench make
it easier to use?
no change?
You are correct about that.. Stress
doesn't determine ease of use.
It's the moment achieved by the
wrench that determines the ease of
use.
yay!
Tutor
It's good to have your contributions
in the discussion Jackie :-)
Tutor
Go team :-)
S89
Go team yay
Tutor
I am happy to be working with our
team
S89
Me too
S95
whoa the bot knows my name
Tutor
Tutor
Unfortunately maximum stress
(12800) in our design1 is way above
the maximum allowed stress (i.e.
8750)
This wrench cannot be safely used!
Results on Breadth of Coverage of
Design Space
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Significant main effect of
Heteroglossia on number of
ideas mentioned
 Heteroglossia
was better
than Monoglossia and
Neutral
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Significant interaction
 In
the Social condition,
Monoglossia was worse than
the other two
Results on Perception
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Students were significantly happier with the interaction in
the Heteroglossia condition than Neutral, with
Monoglossia in the middle
Students liked the Heteroglossic and Monoglossic agents
better than the Neutral agent
Students in the Heteroglossia condition felt marginally
more successful than students in the Monoglossia
condition
No effect on Personality indicators such as Pushy, Wishy
Washy, etc.
Does that mean that impression of personality and how
you feel about an interaction with someone are not
linked?
Student Comment
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I would also note that English is a very
gender neutral language, so gender
performativity is harder to classify.
Discussion from Last Time
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How would you achieve a good balance
between an operationalization of
Engagement that is useful and yet
attainable in terms of reliability of coding?
Hedging and Occupation?
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And as such, I believe hedging is a much
more effective tool in showing generational
or occupational differences rather than
gender differences.
 For
example, teenagers often use verbs such
as 'like' and 'all' to report speech: he was all
'that's stupid' and then he was like ''but I'm
stupid too'. The occupational differences I
would attribute to the differences between
people who need exact values as opposed to
people who can accept generalizations or
approximations.
Questions?