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Dialogism is a philosophical theory centered on the idea that life involves a dialogue among multiple voices in a continuous exchange and interaction. Considering human language, different ideas or points of view take the form of voices, which spread throughout any discourse and influence it. From a computational point of view, voices can be operationalized as semantic chains that contain related words. This study introduces and evaluates a novel method of identifying semantic chains using BERT, a state-of-the-art language model for computational linguistics. The resulting model generalizes to multiple relations including repetitions, semantically related concepts from WordNet (i.e., synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, and siblings), as well as pronominal resolutions. By combining the attention scores between words, word pairs are merged into connected components that denote emerging voices from the discourse. The introduced visualization argues for a more dense capturing of inner semantic links between words and even compound words in contrast to classical methods of building lexical chains. [This paper was published in: "AIED 2021," edited by I. Roll et al., Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2021, pp. 296-301.]

1Boy Crusoe

By Allan Eric

Also published as" A Yankee Crusoe" . A 15 year old hard working and studious farm boy finds the lure of adventure on the seas as a merchant seaman more than he can resist. This is his story. " I was born in a little town in the State of Maine, near the close of the Civil War. My boyhood life did not differ materially from that of the average farmer's son in the remote country districts of New England--except, perhaps, that I read more and thought more. Hard work on the rugged soil, two terms each year in the little yellow country schoolhouse, a day's fishing now and then filled the early years of my life full to over-flowing. " What he gets is enough excitement and adventure to overflow his wildest dreams. How he experiences disaster and uses his wits and knowledge to overcome every problem makes for a great read. - Summary by Phil Chenevert