Hasil untuk "Discourse analysis"

Ahmed Ruby, Christian Hardmeier, Sara Stymne

Implicit discourse relation classification is a challenging task, as it requires inferring meaning from context. While contextual cues can be distributed across modalities and vary across languages, they are not always captured by text alone. To address this, we introduce an automatic method for distantly related and unrelated language pairs to construct a multilingual and multimodal dataset for implicit discourse relations in English, French, and Spanish. For classification, we propose a multimodal approach that integrates textual and acoustic information through Qwen2-Audio, allowing joint modeling of text and audio for implicit discourse relation classification across languages. We find that while text-based models outperform audio-based models, integrating both modalities can enhance performance, and cross-lingual transfer can provide substantial improvements for low-resource languages.

Dina Zhalko

Статтю присвячено дослідженню маркування інтертекстуальних включень у художньому дискурсі з метою розкриття семантико-функційного потенціалу імпліцитних та експліцитних маркерів інтертекстуальності у творах американських та англійських письменників ХХ століття. Аналіз інтертекстуальності в художньому дискурсі допоміг виявити інтертекстуальні маркери та визначити засоби їх репрезентації, систематизувати інтертекстуальні включення та встановити їх дискурсивно-функційний потенціал. Матеріалом дослідження слугували романи "The Crying of Lot 49" Томаса Пінчона та "A History of the World in 10½ Chapters" Джуліана Барнса. Методологія дослідження передбачала використання методу уважного читання для аналізу структури романів, методу текстологічного аналізу творів дібраного матеріалу, методи лінгвостилістичного та інтертекстуального аналізу для  ідентифікації й опису різних видів інтертекстуальності та міжтекстових зв’язків, методу інтермедіального аналізу для встановлення семантичних зв’язків між інтертекстуальними елементами належних до суміжних видів мистецтв,  семантико-стилістичного методу для опису мовностилістичних ресурсів та  їх семантики, методу  деконструкції для ідентифікації непрямих інтертекстуальних зв'язків між текстами. Розроблено критерії для ідентифікації та типологізації інтертекстуальних маркерів: прямі та непрямі. Окреслено особливості семантики й функціонування інтертекстуальних маркерів у проаналізованому корпусі матеріалу. Результати дослідження полягають у розробленні авторської таксономії прямих і непрямих маркерів інтертекстуальності, що дозволить оцінити вплив рівня читацької компетенції на розуміння художніх текстів.

Samaneh Dehghani, Rouhollah Saiiadi nezhad

Sociolinguistics, by studying the reciprocal influence between language and society, seeks to analyze the role of language in human interactions. The novel, as a linguistic discourse encompassing a wide range of literary styles, serves as a window through which the reader can perceive social realities from a linguistic perspective. Hybridization is defined as the blending of language with various literary styles within a single literary work, allowing for an analysis that integrates diverse voices and perspectives. It also enables the study of a broad spectrum of individual and social voices. Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi vividly embodies different forms of hybridization. This study aims to examine and analyze the manifestations of hybridization in this novel using a descriptive-analytical method. The findings indicate that hybridization appears in two main dimensions: unintentional and intentional. In the unintentional dimension, the author unconsciously incorporates borrowed vocabulary from Classical Arabic. In the intentional hybridization, Alharthi elevates the integration of her narrative language with various literary styles by employing intertextual references to the Quran and Hadith, incorporating proverbs and Omani colloquial dialect, and utilizing typographical hybridization. The author employs elements of hybridization to reflect class disparities in society, reinforce religious guidance and moral lessons, and affirm the cultural foundations of her community. This contributes to engaging the reader and enriching the novel, significantly influencing the representation of different societal voices and enabling the reader to grasp the contradictions embedded within its structure.   Keywords: Sociolinguistics, Hybridization, Celestial Bodies, Omani Novel.   Extended summary   Introduction The language constitutes the fundamental material of the novel. Language serves as a primary and prominent tool in embodying narrative and novelistic concepts, as it enables the writer to convey descriptions, emotions, concerns, thoughts, and critiques to the reader. Moreover, the novel functions as an effective medium for reflecting linguistic and literary issues and is capable of portraying social realities through language. Sociolinguistics examines the influences of society on language and vice versa, aiming to analyze the social and cultural roles of language in human interactions, individual and collective identity, social and political changes, and manifestations of power. Studying the impact of society on language, or vice versa, allows for a deeper understanding of characters, narrative realities, and the writer’s intent. It also reveals various aspects of the novel, such as social transformations and cultural exchanges. The study of novels that interlink language with social, cultural, and psychological issues holds significant importance. Research that delves deeply into linguistic interactions gains further value, as it allows for the exploration of a broad spectrum of individual and social voices. The study of the novel Celestial Bodies is of great significance, as it incorporates various forms of linguistic and literary blending. This analysis can provide insights into the author’s motivations and her purpose in utilizing these forms to reflect diverse social and cultural concepts. Examining this novel from a sociolinguistic critical perspective and investigating the relationship between language and different literary forms is crucial and highly valuable due to the importance of language and society as well as the role of language in reflecting social realities and individual and collective voices. Materials & Methods This study aims to apply the sociolinguistic approach to analyze the process of blending and hybridization between different linguistic and literary forms in Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi. The goal is to highlight social and cultural diversity, reflect conflicts and differences within society, and convey valuable social messages to the audience. This research examines Celestial Bodies by Omani author Jokha Alharthi from the perspective of sociolinguistics and hybridization, employing a descriptive-analytical method. The study seeks to identify, present, and scientifically analyze the hybrid elements present in this novel. This research examines the novel Celestial Bodies by the Omani author Jokha Alharthi from the perspective of sociolinguistics and hybridization, using a descriptive-analytical approach. The study aims to identify, present, and scientifically analyze the elements of hybridization present in this novel. Research findings The author of Celestial Bodies, Jokha Alharthi, blends her narrative language with diverse literary techniques. This usage manifests in two dimensions: intentional and unintentional. In the unintentional dimension, the author utilizes borrowed words that have entered the Arabic language unconsciously. She also innovates her narrative language by unconsciously incorporating words from English or other languages. The use of these words enables her to convey her concepts and themes to the reader, enriching her narrative style. In the intentional dimension, the author employs various literary techniques to communicate the ideas she wants to express, such as Quranic and Hadith intertextuality, hybridization (in its various forms, including linguistic nesting), and the use of colloquial language, proverbs, and poetry. The author's deliberate use of hybridization elements, particularly her use of colloquial language, is evident. The use of multiple hybridization techniques in Alharthi's work and their integration with the narrative language demonstrates the author's intentionality and awareness. Through her more deliberate and conscious use of intentional hybridization, as opposed to unintentional hybridization, Alharthi sought to convey specific concepts and ideologies to her audience. Discussion & Conclusion Alharthi created a variety of main and secondary characters in her novel within the framework of linguistic division to showcase class differences through language, blending it with the languages of all social classes. In fact, hybridization in this novel appears in the relationships between the characters and their life experiences, with the author reflecting her use of different forms of literature and the language of the novel through the characters' interactions with the challenges they face. The multiple voices in the novel contribute to building a comprehensive picture of the social reality, revealing tensions and internal conflicts within the community. In fact, the author used various forms of literature within her language in this novel, successfully maintaining the narrative identity while presenting different aspects of society, such as social transformations, class distinctions, cultural exchanges, and strengthening the cultural foundations of her society. This element addresses deep social issues like poverty and exploitation, aiming to provoke the reader into critically contemplating these phenomena. It is clear that the author used colloquial Arabic to depict the village space in her novel, the linguistic division to present class differences within society, proverbs to deliver moral advice, and religious intertextuality with the Quran and Hadith to enhance religious teachings, combat ignorance and superstition, and strengthen the cultural foundations of her society. Overall, Alharthi connected various linguistic and literary tools to the language of her novel, enriching her work through the use of hybridization, such as proverbs, linguistic division, and colloquial language. This not only increased its appeal and diversity but also elevated its maturity and depiction. The author does not just narrate events but integrates literary and linguistic tools to create a text that reflects a complex social reality, highlighting contradictions, injustice, and discrimination within society, allowing the reader to reflect upon and engage with these phenomena.

Alexander Spangher, Tenghao Huang, Jialiang Gu et al.

Recent advances in text summarization have predominantly leveraged large language models to generate concise summaries. However, language models often do not maintain long-term discourse structure, especially in news articles, where organizational flow significantly influences reader engagement. We introduce a novel approach to integrating discourse structure into summarization processes, focusing specifically on news articles across various media. We present a novel summarization dataset where news articles are summarized multiple times in different ways across different social media platforms (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.). We develop a novel news discourse schema to describe summarization structures and a novel algorithm, DiscoSum, which employs beam search technique for structure-aware summarization, enabling the transformation of news stories to meet different stylistic and structural demands. Both human and automatic evaluation results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in maintaining narrative fidelity and meeting structural requirements.

Divyaksh Shukla, Ritesh Baviskar, Dwijesh Gohil et al.

Discourse parsing is an important task useful for NLU applications such as summarization, machine comprehension, and emotion recognition. The current discourse parsing datasets based on conversations consists of written English dialogues restricted to a single domain. In this resource paper, we introduce CoMuMDR: Code-mixed Multi-modal Multi-domain corpus for Discourse paRsing in conversations. The corpus (code-mixed in Hindi and English) has both audio and transcribed text and is annotated with nine discourse relations. We experiment with various SoTA baseline models; the poor performance of SoTA models highlights the challenges of multi-domain code-mixed corpus, pointing towards the need for developing better models for such realistic settings.

Chinyere Ndubuisi

Purpose of the Study: This study examines the contemporary significance of the Ikenga, a crucial cultural symbol among the Igbo people of Nigeria, commonly associated with strength, determination, and entrepreneurial drive. Methodology: The study used a qualitative research design and employed semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and document analysis to collect data from various participants in Igbo society. These participants included entrepreneurs, community leaders, cultural historians, and spiritual leaders. Main Findings: The research reveals that Ikenga continues to serve as a significant cultural icon, supporting entrepreneurship and symbolizing communal achievements and personal aspirations in contemporary times. Despite the challenges of globalization, Ikenga adapts to maintain its relevance, underpinning socio-economic practices and embodying the enduring Igbo values of resilience and determination. Applications of this Study: The findings provide valuable insights for policymakers, cultural practitioners, and scholars, highlighting the importance of integrating cultural heritage into development strategies. This study encourages a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the dynamic interplay between traditional symbols and modern societal roles, offering a model for preserving cultural identity in rapidly changing environments. Novelty/Originality of this Study: This research contributes to the ethnographic literature by offering a contemporary analysis of Ikenga's relevance in Igbo society, beyond its traditional and symbolic interpretations. It underscores the symbol's adaptability and enduring significance, enriching the discourse on the preservation of cultural heritage in the face of globalization and modern challenges.

Singh Sharanpal, Goyal Shilpi

The world is deeply connected through narratives, which enrich its stories and meanings. Tales about others and us bring vibrancy to life, making existence more dynamic. Critical Discourse Studies analyse these narratives, with the Discourse Historical Approach being a prominent method. This approach emphasises the centrality of narratives while integrating elements like comedy, tragedy, irony, and romance, as suggested by Frye. Such integration not only enhances causality, an essential aspect of textual analysis but also ensures that other essential features like conflict remain significant. By combining social dimensions with storytelling, this approach offers a more profound understanding of narratives. Habermas's theory of communicative action plays a vital role here, enhancing the semantic depth of the Discourse Historical Approach. It provides a solid foundation for analysing genres and narratives, making the process more authentic and insightful. Together, these methods create a robust framework for exploring how stories shape meaning and enrich discourse.

Olena Moiseyenko

The statement of the problem. In the context of Russian aggression, the consequences of which are the dead, refugees, deported, and destroyed cities, there is a need to exercise jurisdiction over individuals responsible for the most serious international humanitarian crimes. Linguists faced the question of researching the integrative nature of the relationship between language and international law in bringing people to justice for committing the gravest crimes. Of particular interest in this aspect is the discourse of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, since the duties of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court include the investigation and prosecution of crimes under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, namely genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression. The purpose of the article. The article aims to investigate the rhetorical devices used to create a frame regarding international crimes in the statements of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court concerning the situation in Ukraine. The research methods. A frame analysis aimed at identifying rhetorical language devices in the statements of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court regarding the situation in Ukraine was used as a research method. Thirteen statements by Karim A. A. Khan K. S., Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, regarding the Situation in Ukraine, presented on the official website of the International Criminal Court, were used for the analysis. The main results of the research. The study has shown that the frame that is being built in the statements of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court regarding international crimes committed by Russian criminals during the period of Russian aggression against Ukraine, which began in 2014, has a multi-aspect nature. The study has identified the following aspects in the frame structure: the informational aspect (informing the international community about the general progress of the investigation of crimes and issuing the warrants of arrest against Russian criminals); the legal aspect (legal justification of the investigation of crimes and the issuance of arrest warrants against Russian criminals through reference to the Rome Statute); the communication aspect (prosecutor’s address to victims and witnesses of crimes, address to military personnel, dialogue with the international community); experiential aspect (reports about the experience of visiting crime scenes in Ukraine and communicating with crime victims). Rhetorical devices are used in the implementation of all aspects of the frame. Conclusions and perspectives. The study demonstrates the significant role of linguistic rhetorical devices in the prosecutor’s discourse. In his statements regarding the international humanitarian crimes committed by Russian aggressors in Ukraine and the issuance of arrest warrants against Russian high-ranking officials, Karim A. A. Khan KS, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, demonstrates a high level of rhetorical skills. In building a multi-aspect frame, the Prosecutor uses diverse rhetorical devices, including metaphor, metonymy, allusion, epithet, and rhetorical question. The rhetorical techniques used by the Prosecutor reinforce the essence of his statements: individuals who bear criminal responsibility for committing the atrocity crimes in Ukraine should be brought to justice. A further study of the prosecutor’s discourse in the trial of the International Criminal Court and the study of the prosecutor’s discourse based on the material of the situations in other regions of the world in a comparative perspective is considered promising since the International Criminal Court has experience in prosecuting war criminals.

Jordan K Kobellarz, Milos Brocic, Daniel Silver et al.

Early optimism saw possibilities for social media to renew democratic discourse, marked by hopes for individuals from diverse backgrounds to find opportunities to learn from and interact with others different from themselves. This optimism quickly waned as social media seemed to breed ideological homophily marked by "filter bubble" or "echo chambers." A typical response to the sense of fragmentation has been to encourage exposure to more cross-partisan sources of information. But do outlets that reach across partisan lines in fact generate more civil discourse? And does the civility of discourse hosted by such outlets vary depending on the political context in which they operate? To answer these questions, we identified bubble reachers, users who distribute content that reaches other users with diverse political opinions in recent presidential elections in Brazil, where populism has deep roots in the political culture, and Canada, where the political culture is comparatively moderate. Given that background, this research studies unexplored properties of content shared by bubble reachers, specifically the quality of conversations and comments it generates. We examine how ideologically neutral bubble reachers differ from ideologically partisan accounts in the level of uncivil discourse they provoke, and explore how this varies in the context of the two countries considered. Our results suggest that while ideologically neutral bubble reachers support less uncivil discourse in Canada, the opposite relationship holds in Brazil. Even non-political content by ideologically neutral bubble reachers elicits a considerable amount of uncivil discourse in Brazil. This indicates that bubble reaching and incivility are moderated by the national political context. Our results complicate the simple hypothesis of a universal impact of neutral bubble reachers across contexts.

Amirhossein Dezhboro, Jose Emmanuel Ramirez-Marquez, Aleksandra Krstikj

This research presents a framework for analyzing the dynamics of online communities in social media platforms, utilizing a temporal fusion of text and network data. By combining text classification and dynamic social network analysis, we uncover mechanisms driving community formation and evolution, revealing the influence of real-world events. We introduced fourteen key elements based on social science theories to evaluate social media dynamics, validating our framework through a case study of Twitter data during major U.S. events in 2020. Our analysis centers on discrimination discourse, identifying sexism, racism, xenophobia, ableism, homophobia, and religious intolerance as main fragments. Results demonstrate rapid community emergence and dissolution cycles representative of discourse fragments. We reveal how real-world circumstances impact discourse dominance and how social media contributes to echo chamber formation and societal polarization. Our comprehensive approach provides insights into discourse fragmentation, opinion dynamics, and structural aspects of online communities, offering a methodology for understanding the complex interplay between online interactions and societal trends.

Amelie Robrecht, Judith Sieker, Clara Lachenmaier et al.

In this work, we want to give an overview on which pragmatic abilities have been tested in LLMs so far and how these tests have been carried out. To do this, we first discuss the scope of the field of pragmatics and suggest a subdivision into discourse pragmatics and interactional pragmatics. We give a non-exhaustive overview of the phenomena of those two subdomains and the methods traditionally used to analyze them. We subsequently consider the resulting heterogeneous set of phenomena and methods as a starting point for our survey of work on discourse pragmatics and interactional pragmatics in the context of LLMs.

Csaba Földes

This article is based on the understanding that language is highly complex and has a cognitive, cultural, and formal component. Within this framework, the focus is on the network of relationships regulated by multiple perspectives between culture and language (both as system and as usage), particularly considering the multifaceted term “interculturality”. First, in order to establish a common ground, I provide an overview of the different concepts of the interaction between language and culture in the linguistic research discourse. Furthermore, an overview of the various culture-sensitive linguistic analytical approaches will be developed. In the main body, three recent paradigms, each of different provenance, will be critically presented and compared regarding their content-related concept and their performance potential. These are (a) Russian and post-Soviet “Linguoculturology” (LC), (b) Anglophone “Cultural Linguistics” (CL), and (c) “Intercultural Linguistics” (IL), primarily origininating in German Studies with a particular focus on multilingualism. It becomes apparent that LC investigates the influence of language on culture, whereas CL aims its attention at the influence of culture on language, while in IL, multi-culturality as well as inter- and transculturality are the focal point. The presented paradigms differ significantly with regard to their respective underlying understanding of culture and their disciplinary orientation: LC and CL exhibit a distinctive cognitive orientation, whereas IL is more based on Contrastive Linguistics and Cultural Studies. The conducted analysis gives evidence of the isolated development of all three schools of thought, especially LC and CL, despite their almost identical research objectives.

Madhumita Pandey

Research involving prisoners is a vital source of information on crime but is often fraught with several challenges. This article presents an analysis of one of the first prison researches conducted in India with men convicted of rape. It examines and expands on the nuances of interacting with men convicted of rape and exploring a range of deeply personal questions with them. The research analysis attempts to highlight the impact of the researcher's positionality on offender accounts by also discussing social proximity and gender. This article contributes to the broader discourse around conducting qualitative research in prisons.

seyyedhossein athari, Zahra Mohamadpour

Introduction The heart of any state or government's stability is its legitimacy, which confirms the validity of governmental decrees and ensures the continuity of governance. The Sassanid era is one historical period where the very foundations of the state's authority and political ideology were called into question in Iran. Challenges to the religious values, which were the mainstay of the government's legitimacy, led to both social and political upheaval. This was particularly evident following the emergence of new religions and rituals, which posed a threat and underscored the urgent need for the restoration of legitimacy. In response to this crisis, the ideological apparatus of the Sassanid state employed various strategies. Among these, the 'Ardavirafnameh' stands out as a cultural mechanism that articulated the principles, values, and ideals embodying the political ideology meant to reaffirm the state's legitimacy and ensure the survival of Sassanid rule. The research posits, through the application of Skinner's intentionalism hermeneutic framework, that the 'Ardavirafnameh' was written under specific conditions, within a particular context and intellectual milieu, with a definitive purpose. The hypothesis suggests that the text was crafted as an ideological instrument aimed at addressing the legitimacy crisis faced by the Sassanid government. The primary objective of the author in composing this text appears to have been to influence the political culture of the time, thereby reconstructing the foundational legitimacy of the Sassanid state. Methodology The research employs Quentin Skinner's internationalist interpretive methodology to delve into the underlying messages of the text. Skinner's approach underscores the importance of understanding the text's examination in conjunction with the author's intentions and the objective and intellectual circumstances under which it was produced. In the initial phase of applying Skinner's method, efforts are made to grasp the political issues and debates of the Ardaviraf era, as well as the responses and solutions that were proposed at the time. By reconstructing the socio-political climate and the intellectual milieu in which the 'Ardavirafnameh' was composed, we can illuminate the challenges that confronted the Zoroastrian Monads, under Ardaviraf leadership, allowing for a more accurate comprehension of how these issues influenced the author's thinking. Following this, the analysis aims to discern the unique language, meanings, concepts, and prevailing propositions employed in the 'Ardavirafnameh.' This step involves examining the traditions, norms, principles, and conventional rules that shaped the political arguments and discourse of the time. Suchan exploration is crucial for understanding the societal context of the period and the author's intent behind creating the text. Discussion The Sassanid government, during its four-century rule (224 to 651 AD), sought to establish legitimacy through various means to maintain public support. Their legitimacy was built on tradition by associating themselves with Parthian and Achaemenid kings. Additionally, the charismatic personality of the kings and the support of the people formed the basis of their authority. However, the most significant foundation of Sassanid legitimacy was Zoroastrianism. The king derived power from God, and Zoroastrian decrees became the official law of the state, shaping Iranian culture, politics, and ideological legitimacy. The authority of Sassanid clerics, the Mobdans, unified society around religion, unprecedented in pre-Islamic Iran. However, the collision of Zoroastrianism with other religions led to the emergence of religious heresies. Mani's religion, a blend of beliefs, aimed to end conflicts and class divides, subtly guiding followers to oppose the government. Similarly, Mazdak Bamadan's reinterpretation of the Avesta protested Sassanid laws and structures, advocating for equality and sparking socialist changes that led to the collapse of the state system and upheaval in the country. Mani's religion marked the first instance of sedition and religious heresy arising from conflicting beliefs. His teachings combined popular beliefs and religions of the time, aiming to end wars and social injustices by uniting different religions. He offered followers a path of peace and mystical isolation in response to nobles and pious individuals. Mani's religious doctrines concealed a political agenda, subtly guiding people's beliefs towards opposition to the government. Mazdak Bamadan, a prominent cleric of the Qobad era, initiated a social uprising by reinterpreting the Avesta in protest against Sassanian structures and laws. His movement sought to rectify the deviations caused by religious leaders, representing a protest against the Sassanid social and political system. Emphasizing the equality of all individuals, his teachings garnered numerous followers and led to revolutionary socialist changes in Iran. Those advocating fundamental societal changes pushed to extremes, resulting in the collapse of the state system and pushing the country to the brink of ruin.      In this way, the emergence of new religions led to people`s suspicion towards the country`s official religion and the threat of political power, which ultimately led to severe repression and the brutal killing of Mani and Mazdak and their followers. However, these religions did not disappear and even after the fall of the Sassanids, they also opposed the muslim religion in the form of social movements. The Sassanid era, which was the era of prosperity and influx of religious opinions and new thoughts, forsed the Zoroastrain rulers and priests as agents of the religious institution to take a stand and react against these new religions and religious opponents, and writing the Ardavirafnameh book as an ideological tool of confrontation. It is with these religions that he trais to define the framework of condition of political conflict and draw the legitimacy clamis of those in power according to the type of political regime and power structures based on cultural contexts. Conclusion Based on the explanation provided in this research, the Ardaviraf era's timeframe, transformations, and historical developments underscore the restoration of political legitimacy as the central concern of Zoroastrianism. The text Ardavirafnameh, portraying heaven and hell, serves as an exposition of Mobdans' thoughts led by Ardaviraf, aiming to influence the political culture of society. It is evident that the societal transformation is linked to changes in the ruling political culture, emphasizing the text's role in shaping this culture and sustaining the state's political legitimacy. Despite being a religious text, Ardavirafnameh reflects the ideology of the Sasanian government and Zoroastrian priests. The Mobdans, as the primary decision-makers and influencers in vital cultural aspects, established the idea that the perpetuation of the royal line depends on their resourcefulness and persistence, taking advantage of the kings' weaknesses for their own benefit. As the most influential class in Sassanid society, the Mobdans sought strategies for integrating and legitimizing political values, norms, and structures with a focus on the campaign. Consequently, this text, as a strategic choice by the political elite, underscores religious ideology's aspects, aiming to foster a sense of political unity, common values, norms, and shared political goals among society members. It serves to capture the minds of individuals and emphasizes the importance of religious and moral beliefs in accepting and obeying the king, religious values, and governmental requirements. Recognizing that political legitimacy hinges on societal beliefs and perceptions, religious leaders aim to leverage Ardavirafnameh as a political instrument to cultivate legitimacy among the people. Therefore, the document's purpose was to return to religious foundations, signifying a return to the basis of Sasanian state legitimacy.

Omar Sharif, Madhusudan Basak, Tanzia Parvin et al.

Social media sites have become a popular platform for individuals to seek and share health information. Despite the progress in natural language processing for social media mining, a gap remains in analyzing health-related texts on social discourse in the context of events. Event-driven analysis can offer insights into different facets of healthcare at an individual and collective level, including treatment options, misconceptions, knowledge gaps, etc. This paper presents a paradigm to characterize health-related information-seeking in social discourse through the lens of events. Events here are board categories defined with domain experts that capture the trajectory of the treatment/medication. To illustrate the value of this approach, we analyze Reddit posts regarding medications for Opioid Use Disorder (OUD), a critical global health concern. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to define event categories for characterizing information-seeking in OUD social discourse. Guided by domain experts, we develop TREAT-ISE, a novel multilabel treatment information-seeking event dataset to analyze online discourse on an event-based framework. This dataset contains Reddit posts on information-seeking events related to recovery from OUD, where each post is annotated based on the type of events. We also establish a strong performance benchmark (77.4% F1 score) for the task by employing several machine learning and deep learning classifiers. Finally, we thoroughly investigate the performance and errors of ChatGPT on this task, providing valuable insights into the LLM's capabilities and ongoing characterization efforts.

Sabit Hassan, Malihe Alikhani

Counterspeech can be an effective method for battling hateful content on social media. Automated counterspeech generation can aid in this process. Generated counterspeech, however, can be viable only when grounded in the context of topic, audience and sensitivity as these factors influence both the efficacy and appropriateness. In this work, we propose a novel framework based on theories of discourse to study the inferential links that connect counter speeches to the hateful comment. Within this framework, we propose: i) a taxonomy of counterspeech derived from discourse frameworks, and ii) discourse-informed prompting strategies for generating contextually-grounded counterspeech. To construct and validate this framework, we present a process for collecting an in-the-wild dataset of counterspeech from Reddit. Using this process, we manually annotate a dataset of 3.9k Reddit comment pairs for the presence of hatespeech and counterspeech. The positive pairs are annotated for 10 classes in our proposed taxonomy. We annotate these pairs with paraphrased counterparts to remove offensiveness and first-person references. We show that by using our dataset and framework, large language models can generate contextually-grounded counterspeech informed by theories of discourse. According to our human evaluation, our approaches can act as a safeguard against critical failures of discourse-agnostic models.

Pru Hobson-West

Critique of vaccination policy and practice has a long history, and social scientists and others have devoted significant efforts to understanding this phenomenon. This attention has only increased in light of the coronavirus pandemic, with public health concerns expressed about opposition to vaccination strategies. However, much less attention has thus far been devoted to understanding veterinary vaccine critique. This is problematic, given the central role of animals in the production and consumption of vaccines, and the existence of veterinary professional anxiety and international media coverage. The lack of existing literature may reflect a wider paucity of research on the veterinary profession; a paucity actively being challenged by new fields of veterinary anthropology and sociology. This short report is based on a discourse analysis of a UK campaign group, which questions aspects of companion animal vaccine policy. Findings suggest that the kinds of discourses used are similar to those made in the human vaccine domain: questions of risk, trust in expertise and imaginaries of science are thus not unique to human medicine. However, the article argues that some of the discourses identified are actually in line with wider social and cultural developments in healthcare. This argument has potential implications for veterinary professionals, as well as scholars interested in animal or human medicine. The article concludes by identifying future research trajectories, focused on further analysis of discursive practice, or the use of ethnographic observation to more fully understand the relationship between humans and non-humans, including animals and vaccine technologies.

Siyao Peng, Yang Janet Liu, Amir Zeldes

This document provides extensive guidelines and examples for Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) annotation in Mandarin Chinese. The guideline is divided into three sections. We first introduce preprocessing steps to prepare data for RST annotation. Secondly, we discuss syntactic criteria to segment texts into Elementary Discourse Units (EDUs). Lastly, we provide examples to define and distinguish discourse relations in different genres. We hope that this reference manual can facilitate RST annotations in Chinese and accelerate the development of the RST framework across languages.

Sidharth Ranjan, Marten van Schijndel, Sumeet Agarwal et al.

We test the hypothesis that discourse predictability influences Hindi syntactic choice. While prior work has shown that a number of factors (e.g., information status, dependency length, and syntactic surprisal) influence Hindi word order preferences, the role of discourse predictability is underexplored in the literature. Inspired by prior work on syntactic priming, we investigate how the words and syntactic structures in a sentence influence the word order of the following sentences. Specifically, we extract sentences from the Hindi-Urdu Treebank corpus (HUTB), permute the preverbal constituents of those sentences, and build a classifier to predict which sentences actually occurred in the corpus against artificially generated distractors. The classifier uses a number of discourse-based features and cognitive features to make its predictions, including dependency length, surprisal, and information status. We find that information status and LSTM-based discourse predictability influence word order choices, especially for non-canonical object-fronted orders. We conclude by situating our results within the broader syntactic priming literature.

Cristina Menghini, Justin Uhr, Shahrzad Haddadan et al.

#MyBodyMyChoice is a well-known hashtag originally created to advocate for women's rights, often used in discourse about abortion and bodily autonomy. The Covid-19 outbreak prompted governments to take containment measures such as vaccination campaigns and mask mandates. Population groups opposed to such measures started to use the slogan "My Body My Choice" to claim their bodily autonomy. In this paper, we investigate whether the discourse around the hashtag #MyBodyMyChoice on Twitter changed its usage after the Covid-19 outbreak. We observe that the conversation around the hashtag changed in two ways. First, semantically, the hashtag #MyBodyMyChoice drifted towards conversations around Covid-19, especially in messages opposed to containment measures. Second, while before the pandemic users used to share content produced by experts and authorities, after Covid-19 the users' attention has shifted towards individuals.