Scientific discourse modeling: a semiotic view

Once introduced the semiotic concept of discourse we aim to develop a discussion about the process of constructing the scientific discourse, that is, the modeling process of scientific law declarations through linguistics texts, whereas a imposed enunciation. For that, we distinguish three basic components:1. Intention, which is a motivation, animpulse for the discourse generation; 2. Enunciation, which express the scientific text itself; and 3. Legislation,which assumes a law enunciation. All this is established in order to assume a discourse of truth, including the correspondence with mathematical proofs. So, we characterize the symbolic manipulation of self evidence empirical facts which are reflected into the enunciations by a law format.

Evaluating Document Coherence Modeling

While pretrained language models (LMs) have driven impressive gains over morpho-syntactic and semantic tasks, their ability to model discourse and pragmatic phenomena is less clear. As a step towards a better understanding of their discourse modeling capabilities, we propose a sentence intrusion detection task. We examine the performance of a broad range of pretrained LMs on this detection task for English. Lacking a dataset for the task, we introduce INSteD, a novel intruder sentence detection dataset, containing 170,000+ documents constructed from English Wikipedia and CNN news articles. Our experiments show that pretrained LMs perform impressively in in-domain evaluation, but experience a substantial drop in the cross-domain setting, indicating limited generalization capacity. Further results over a novel linguistic probe dataset show that there is substantial room for improvement, especially in the cross- domain setting.

LUMINO KINETIC ART BY FRANK MALINA IN THE DISCOURSE SPACE OF SCREEN CULTURE

The article studies the work of Frank Joseph Malina (1912–1981), scientist, rocket engineer and artist, within the discourse space of screen culture. Modern screen science aims to explore the broad intermedia connections and cultural contexts associated with analyzing the technological, informational, and communicative features of digital screen surfaces, as well as determining their influence on the human cognitive and sensory apparatus. Technological art can be perceived as one of the discourses of media archaeology, within which the topoi of modern screen forms are identified and aestheticized. The prospects of research within the declared discourse field are associated with the fact that the creative response to intensive scientific and technological development concentrated on the key problems of the changing system of cultural communications. The screen as a boundary, as a window into the reality of representation, as a place for the “assembly” of corporal and sensory response to interaction with the information space—these and other meanings were addressed by envoys of technological art. Curiosity about the work of F. Malina in the context of screen culture is associated with his lumino kinetic experiments. They were aimed at the artistic mastering of the world standing on the verge of entering the digital virtual space. The article emphasizes that at the heart of his research was a screen form in which light fluxes gathered together thanks to electromechanical systems; in which light radiation came into contact with the human eye and body. Through his art, Malina explores the possibilities and limits of human perception, inevitably changing in the era of intensive scientific and technological development. The directions of his exploration testify to the discourse modeling of the modern computer screen. They can be taken as harbingers of the cultural communications of the digital age.

Integrative methodological platform to reconstruct macrounits of discourse in functioning: Belarusian case study

Discourse Linguistics, an applied field of research focused on complex contentmacrostructures open to multiple transformations in functioning, currently raises such a research problem as how to cope with its multidimensional units staying focused on its holistic nature. For this integrative methodological platforms are introduced and tested. The authors, accepting discourse community representations built within the composites of the image-making discourse type as a forefront research object, introduce and verify such kind of a platform both theoretically and practically (on the discourse of respondents who represent one of currently built Belarusian discourse communities). The approaches inbuilt into the platform are Tartu-Moscow semiotic school (Lotman 2005, 205-226), French school of discourse analysis (Maingueneau 2002, 185-190), the causal-genetic approach of discourse modeling / CGA (Oukhvanova 2017, 5-16), and Swales’ approach to discourse community research (2016).

ON PARAMETRES OF THE APOLOGY DISCOURSE DESCRIPTION

The article concerns the problem of the constitutive features of the communicative situation of apology. The author discusses methodological and linguistic characteristics of inter-personal and public apology described in modern Russian monographs. Critical analysis is given to rationalization of apology in these principal approaches: responsive discourse modeling; speech genre modeling; interactive modeling; complex algorithmic modeling; model speech act representation; contextual perception; linguo-cultural discursive-etiquette manifestation; socio-typological manifestation.

The Human Age

This introductory chapter discusses how the novel, the ascendant imaginative form in nineteenth-century Europe, did more than broadcast the anthropological turn of secular knowledge: it helped steer it and—under the license of fiction—it pressed it to its limits. As the history of man broke up among competing disciplinary claims on scientific authority after 1800, the novel took over as its universal discourse, modeling the new developmental conception of human nature as a relation between the history of individual persons and the history of the species. The novel's supposed aesthetic disability, its lack of form, now marked its fitness to model the changing form of man. Novels could offer a comprehensive representation of human life—a Human Comedy—in a general writing accessible to all readers, mediated not by specialist knowledge or technical language but by the shared sensibilities that constitute “our common nature.” Thus, novels became active instruments in the ongoing scientific revolution, advancing its experimental postulates that human nature may not be one but many, that humans share their nature with other creatures, that humans have no nature, that the human form is variable, fluid, fleeting—as well as developing a technical practice, realism, to defend humanity's place at the center of nature and at the end of history.

Annotating a broad range of anaphoric phenomena, in a variety of genres: the ARRAU Corpus

This paper presents the second release of arrau, a multigenre corpus of anaphoric information created over 10 years to provide data for the next generation of coreference/anaphora resolution systems combining different types of linguistic and world knowledge with advanced discourse modeling supporting rich linguistic annotations. The distinguishing features of arrau include the following: treating all NPs as markables, including non-referring NPs, and annotating their (non-) referentiality status; distinguishing between several categories of non-referentiality and annotating non-anaphoric mentions; thorough annotation of markable boundaries (minimal/maximal spans, discontinuous markables); annotating a variety of mention attributes, ranging from morphosyntactic parameters to semantic category; annotating the genericity status of mentions; annotating a wide range of anaphoric relations, including bridging relations and discourse deixis; and, finally, annotating anaphoric ambiguity. The current version of the dataset contains 350K tokens and is publicly available from LDC. In this paper, we discuss in detail all the distinguishing features of the corpus, so far only partially presented in a number of conference and workshop papers, and we also discuss the development between the first release of arrau in 2008 and this second one.