People engage in discourse every day - from writing letters and presenting papers to simple discussions. Yet discourse is a complex and fascinating phenomenon that is not well understood. This volume stems from a multidisciplinary workshop in which eminent scholars in linguistics, sociology and computational linguistics presented various aspects of discourse. The topics treated range from multi-party conversational interactions to deconstructing text from various perspectives, considering topic-focus development and discourse structure, and an empirical study of discourse segmentation. The chapters not only describe each author's favorite burning issue in discourse but also provide a fascinating view of the research methodology and style of argumentation in each field.

Recognizing that the generation of natural language is a goal- driven process, where many of the goals are pragmatic (i.e., interpersonal and situational) in nature, this book provides an overview of the role of pragmatics in language generation.
Each chapter states a problem that arises in generation, develops a pragmatics-based solution, and then describes how the solution is implemented in PAULINE, a language generator that can produce numerous versions of a single underlying message, depending on its setting.

People engage in discourse every day - from writing letters and presenting papers to simple discussions. Yet discourse is a complex and fascinating phenomenon that is not well understood. This volume stems from a multidisciplinary workshop in which eminent scholars in linguistics, sociology and computational linguistics presented various aspects of discourse. The topics treated range from multi-party conversational interactions to deconstructing text from various perspectives, considering topic-focus development and discourse structure, and an empirical study of discourse segmentation. The chapters not only describe each author's favorite burning issue in discourse but also provide a fascinating view of the research methodology and style of argumentation in each field.