Readability and Discourse Lecture 1

About the course MW 4:30—6:00 Two “deliverables” for the class Literature overview Project Class presentations of papers/discussion

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Dialogue systems Recognizing communication failures Transfer to human operator if the person gets frustrated Users change their behavior after misrecognition: hyperarticulation The Let’s go! system