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<Paper uid="P86-1021">
  <Title>THE INTONATIONAL STRUCTURING OF DISCOURSE</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
2. The Domain
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> TNT was designed to teach computer-naive subjects vi, a simple UNIX screen-oriented text editor. The tutorial portion provides a brief introduction to word processing, to general features of vi, and to the tutor's help facilities; the tutor then guides subjects through a series of learning tasks of graduated difficulty. While the overall task structure is implicit in the tutorial text, the sub-ject can influence the course of the interaction via his/her manipulation of a set of 'helper' keys; these keys provide hints (HINT) and reminders (REMIND) as well as the option of starting a task over again (DO OVER) or suspending the tutorial temporarily (HOLD).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The fact that TNT is explicitly task-oriented, 2 makes it a good test-bed for our purposes. An appropriate segmentation of the text, and a notion of the purpose of each segment and the hierarchical relationships among segments, can be independently determined from the task at hand. Also, certain characteristics of the text presented a particularly interesting challenge for our study. First, the script contains little pronominal reference and very few so-called clue words - words and phrases such as now, next, returning to, but, and on the other hand, which can identify discourse segment boundaries and relationships among segments, signal interruptions and digressions, and so on \[19,20\]. Both of these phenomena (together with intonation) have been identified as important strategies for communicating discourse structure \[15,18,19\]. Their virtual absence from the text presents a convenient opportunity for testing the power of intonation to structure a discourse. Second, while we were not able to isolate points in the text where subjects had special difficulties, we did informally observe certain general problems with turn-taking 3 in the tutor -- specifically, it was not always clear when the tutor's turn was over - which we addressed in our synthesis of the text.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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