The Society for Text & Discourse (ST&D) selects the recipient of the Tom Trabasso Young Investigator Award to "an outstanding young investigator who embodies Tom Trabasso’s spirit of mentoring young scholars and creating a supportive context in our Society. Recipients have shown exceptional and innovative contributions to discourse research and demonstrated superior promise as leaders in the field."
The award was presented by Art Grasser and incoming president of ST&D Joe Magliano.
Sidney gave a keynote talk titled 'The Necessity, Opportunity, and Promise of Multimodal Computational Analyses of Discourse' as part of the award.
ABSTRACT. It is generally accepted that computational analyses of discourse can complement other analytical approaches including think-alouds, code and count, and experimental methods. I suggest that their utility extends beyond a mere complementary role. They serve a necessary role when data is too large for manual analysis, an opportunistic role by addressing questions that are beyond the purview of traditional methods, and a promissory role in facilitating change when fully-automated models drive real-time interventions and/or reflective review. Multimodal computational approaches provide further benefits by affording analysis of disparate constructs emerging across multiple types of discourse in diverse contexts. To illustrate, I discuss studies that use linguistic, paralinguistic, behavioral, and physiological signals for the analysis of rhetorical, expository, pedagogical, dialogic, and collaborative discourse collected in individual, small group, multi-party, and human-computer interactions in the lab and in the wild with the goal of understanding and/or facilitating cognitive, noncognitive, socio-affective-cognitive, and life outcomes.