Readability and Discourse

1
Readability and Discourse

• Lecture 1

2
About the course

• MW 430600
• Two deliverables for the class
• Literature overview
• Project
• Class presentations of papers/discussion

3
Genres

• Multi-sentential text
• What makes a text cohesive and coherent?
• How can we characterize text readability/accessibi
  lity?
  
• Dialogue
• Human-human
• Dialogue systems

4
Multi-sentential text (I)

• Global text organization
• Introduction comes before Methods and Results
  (scientific paper domain)
  
• Disaster reports
• where
• what
• casualties
• damages

5
Multi-sentential text (II)

• Local/entity coherence
• CALCUTTA, India (AP) The destitute and the
  diseased still gather outside Mother Teresa's
  clinics in this sprawling city in eastern India,
  where the nun known simply as "Mother" dedicated
  her life to the poorest of the poor.
• Mother Teresa died 10 years ago Wednesday, but
  the legacy of the Roman Catholic nun who became a
  Nobel Peace Prize winner continues to inspire.
  The order she founded, the Missionaries of
  Charity, has expanded the group says it now has
  more than 4,800 sisters and more than 750 homes
  worldwide.

6
Multi-sentential text (III)

• Entity reference realization
• CALCUTTA, India (AP) The destitute and the
  diseased still gather outside Mother Teresa's
  clinics in this sprawling city in eastern India,
  where the nun known simply as "Mother" dedicated
  her life to the poorest of the poor.
• Mother Teresa died 10 years ago Wednesday, but
  the legacy of the Roman Catholic nun who became a
  Nobel Peace Prize winner continues to inspire.
  The order she founded, the Missionaries of
  Charity, has expanded the group says it now has
  more than 4,800 sisters and more than 750 homes
  worldwide.

7
Multi-sentential text (IV)

• Readability/accessibility vocabulary, syntactic
  structures used, sentence length
  
• CALCUTTA, India (AP) The destitute and the
  diseased still gather outside Mother Teresa's
  clinics in this sprawling city in eastern India,
  where the nun known simply as "Mother" dedicated
  her life to the poorest of the poor.
• Mother Teresa died 10 years ago Wednesday, but
  the legacy of the Roman Catholic nun who became a
  Nobel Peace Prize winner continues to inspire.
  The order she founded, the Missionaries of
  Charity, has expanded the group says it now has
  more than 4,800 sisters and more than 750 homes
  worldwide.

8
Applications

• Summarization and questions answering
• automatic evaluation for content exist, but not
  for readability aspects
  
• Improving statistical machine translation?
• Tutoring systems
• Finding readings suitable for a given grade level
  or language competance

9
Dialogue

• Turn taking
• Holding and giving up the floor
• Backchannels
• Adjusting to the conversational partner
• Adaptation, mimicry, entrainment

10
Dialogue systems

• Recognizing communication failures
• Transfer to human operator if the person gets
  frustrated
  
• Users change their behavior after misrecognition
  hyperarticulation
  
• The Lets go! system