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We present an extensive corpus study of Centering Theory (CT), examining how adequately CT models coherence in a large body of natural text. A novel analysis of transition bigrams provides strong empirical support for several CT-related linguistic claims which so far have been investigated only on various small data sets. The study also reveals genre-based differences in texts’ degrees of entity coherence. Previous work has shown unsupervised CT-based coherence metrics to be unable to outperform a simple baseline. We identify two reasons: 1) these metrics assume that some transition types are more coherent and that they occur more frequently than others, but in our corpus the latter is not the case; and 2) the original sentence order of a document and a random permutation of its sentences differ mostly in the fraction of entity-sharing sentence pairs, exactly the factor measured by the baseline.
This paper presents a hybrid pronoun resolution system for German. It uses a simple rule-driven entity-mention formalism to incrementally process discourse entities. Antecedent selection is performed based on Markov Logic Networks (MLNs). The hybrid architecture yields a cheap problem formulation in the MLNs w.r.t. inference complexity but pertains their expressiveness. We compare the system to a rule-driven baseline and an extension which uses a memory-based learner. We find that the MLN hybrid outperforms its competitors by large margins.
The paper by Beatrix Kreß provides a contrastive study of face work in German and Russian online communication. She analyses users' comments in online newspaper and comes to the conclusion that Russian debates tend to have a more direct style, whereas German users more frequently apply humour to mitigate FTAs.
The difference between experts and laypeople is also the subject of the paper by Gesa Linnemann, Benjamin Brummernhenrich and Regina Jucks. In an experiment in pedagogical psychology, they examine efficient knowledge acquisition in e-learning contexts. In the experiment, tutors applied various strategies to criticise the learners' results, with different intensity levels of face threat. If mitigating strategies were used, the learners considered the tutors to be more credible.
Martina Schrader-Kniffki analyses how such status attributions are developed in the French forum 'Francais notre belle langue'. Users of this community discuss language-related topics, usually on the level of laypeople in linguistics. However, the self-presentation of the participants plays an important role in the discussion, which is often the result of intentional subjectified speech acts. In this way, the users develop evidentially and constructed knowledge.
The construction of a shared enemy is also the subject of the paper by Bettina Kluge. She examines the phenomenon of the troll, a user who joins a constructive debate with the intention of systematically destroying it by making hurtful or meaningless contributions or ones that detract from the subject. The paper looks at how a community cooperatively construes a user as a troll and how it deals wirh this disruptive behaviour.
The author dedicates her paper to collective attacks against absent third parties. The users, who do not know each other, construct a shared concept of the enemy which they then male fun of, attacking it collectively in the form of so-called 'flaming'. Even if the person being attacked is unaware of it, this FTA has the effect of enhancing the shared face of the group of attackers.
The author examines Comments on recipes in a French and Italian cooking community. She discovers how users avoid open criticism and use various diluting strategies to ensure that the potential FTA is mitigated. These include, for example, messages formulated in the first person to deflect the criticism from the addressed person, and and praise aimed at balancing and putting the criticism into perspective.
The author shows, on the basis of Watts' model, that online communication on interaction platforms tends to be marked. Due to the media conditions, utterances can be misunderstood or ambigious. This often leads to a discussion about how a post is to be interpreted and about a third party who may also be reading - a potential FTA. To counteract this, verbal, paraverbal an non-verbal strategies aim at marking the posts through multiple codes by means of their user profile, with their avatar, signature, etc. - options many platforms provide and thus support such behaviour.
The author examines interactions in a forum community. Her paper focuses primarily on the negotiation of status, which is measured for example by the length of membership and the activity of the users in the communities. Using the example of the community 'The Student Room', she shows that newcomers first have to earn the right to perform certain verbal actions.
The authors discuss how mutual criticism is expressed in the CouchSurfing community. As this community is based on mutual trust and the willingness to provide overnight accommodation in their own homes, user ratings that contain criticism and negative judgement have to be formulated in a way to avoid further conflicts and to maintain a good host image. This is why many negative evaluations contain mitigating strategies that anticipate future interactions in the community and that can be judged as face work.
In this paper, the author reflects in the terms self, identity and face. She will give (psychological) definitions of the terms self and identity and differentiate the two terms before she details the concept of face. The author will exemplify the use of face in a qualitative analysis in the Spanish online forum "Crepúsculo" (Twighlight).
On platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, on message boards, in blogs and commentaries, in short: in the Social Media, users interact as if they knew each other personally. Malicious verbal behaviour is found next to clapping and kissing emoticons, both indicative of users' relational work strategies. This book presents seventeen papers on face work in Social Media – theoretical reflections as well as corpus-based studies – thus opening the way to rethink linguistic pragmatics in computer-mediated communication.
Face Work and Social Media
(2014)
On platforms such as Facebook and Twtter, on message boards, in blogs and commentaries, in short: in the Social Media, users interact as if they knew each other personally. Malicious verbal behaviour is found next to clapping and kissing emoticons, both indicative of users' relational work strategies. This book presents seventeen papers on face work in Social Media - theoretical reflections as well as corpus-based studies - thus opening the way to rethink linguistic pragmatics in computer-mediated communication.
