Computational
Models of
Discourse Analysis
Carolyn Penstein Rosé
Language Technologies Institute/
Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Warm-Up

What is your frame-style analysis of this interaction?


What frames do you see, and what is the evidence that evokes
those frames in your mind?
Questions to consider:




What is a metaphor according to Lakoff, and how does that
relate to Tannen’s notion of a frame?
Is metaphor a linguistic construct? Or would you characterize it
differently?
Do metaphors structure language, or do they reflect a structure
that arises from something else?
How do the ideas of metaphor and frame relate to the other
linguistic analysis frameworks we have discussed?
How do metaphors structure
experience?
 How does

something
become a
metaphor we
live by?
At what point
does the idea of
a metaphor as a
structuring
device become
vacuous?
Tannen: …people approach the world not
What is a frame?
as naïve, blank-slate receptacles who take
in stimuli as they exist in some
independent
Is thereandanything
more
specific
objective way,
but rather
as experienced and sophisticated veterans
about what a frame is than the
of perception who have stored their prior
experiences
organized mass” and
notion as
of“an
expectation?
who see events and objects in the world in
relation
Howto one
do another
we find
evidence
and in
relation to of
their prior experience. This prior
expectations in a text?
experience or organized knowledge then
takes
form of expectations
theHeist
 the
Examples
from theabout
Pear
world, and in the vast majority of cases, the
movie example
world, being a systematic place, confirms
expectations,
saving the individual
these
What
was different
between
the trouble of figuring things out anew all
thethe
time.frames evoked in the
American recountings of the
versus the Greek ones?
What is the danger in this pointed out
movie
by Wantanabe wrt intercultural
communication?
How does the notion of a frame
inform our analysis of turn
taking?

What is a turn:
 Syntactic
units: sentences, clauses, noun phrases
 Prosody: intonation tells us where we are in “the arc” of
communicating an idea
 Indicators of whose turn is next: gaze, names, etc.
 Projectability: we need to be able to identify places
where control over the floor could shift – doesn’t mean
it will shift.
Connection with last time:

Student quote: I guess what I'm trying to
say is that one feature of the interpersonal
dependence should be their relative rank (I
understand that this is hard because a
younger sister may be the boss of an older
brother in the workplace, but they are
ranked higher in some cultures at home).

How does this connect with the idea of
framing we see in the Watanabe chapter?
What would be the frame spin on this?

Student quote: Of course, then the problem
becomes, how do we define what these
roles are? When do we assign someone to
one role or another? When do we allow
people to shift from one role to another?
What happens when multiple people are
acting in the same role at the same time?
All of these things make that modeling
enormously complex and probably reliant
on far more data than is actually available,
especially annotated. …
More Discussion

What is a metaphor according to Lakoff, and how does
that relate to Tannen’s notion of a frame?


Is metaphor a linguistic construct? Or would you
characterize it differently?



Are there aspects of frames that don’t fit the idea of a
metaphor?
If it’s not linguistic, how do we use it?
Do metaphors structure language, or do they reflect a
structure that arises from something else?
How do the ideas of metaphor and frame relate to the
other linguistic analysis frameworks we have
discussed?
For next time
Questions?