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Handbook of Technical Communication
HAL 8

Handbooks of Applied Linguistics
Communication Competence
Language and Communication Problems
Practical Solutions
Editors
Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos
Volume 8
De Gruyter Mouton

Handbook of
Technical Communication
Edited by
Alexander Mehler and Laurent Romary
In cooperation with
Dafydd Gibbon
De Gruyter Mouton

ISBN 978-3-11-018834-9
e-ISBN 978-3-11-022494-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
” 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Cover design: Martin Zech, Bremen
Typesetting: Dörlemann Satz GmbH & Co. KG, Lemförde
Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen
앪
앝 Printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Germany
www.degruyter.com

Introduction to the handbook series v
Introduction to the handbook series
Linguistics for problem solving
Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos
1. Science and application at the turn of the millennium
The distinction between “pure” and “applied” sciences is an old one. Accord-
ing to Meinel (2000), it was introduced by the Swedish chemist Wallerius
in 1751, as part of the dispute of that time between the scholastic disciplines
and the then emerging epistemic sciences. However, although the concept of
“Applied Science” gained currency rapidly since that time, it has remained
problematic.
Until recently, the distinction between “pure” and “applied” mirrored the
distinction between “theory and “practice”. The latter ran all the way through
Western history of science since its beginnings in antique times. At first, it was
only philosophy that was regarded as a scholarly and, hence, theoretical disci-
pline. Later it was followed by other leading disciplines, as e.g., the sciences.
However, as academic disciplines, all of them remained theoretical. In fact, the
process of achieving independence of theory was essential for the academic dis-
ciplines to become independent from political, religious or other contingencies
and to establish themselves at universities and academies. This also implied a
process of emancipation from practical concerns – an at times painful develop-
ment which manifested (and occasionally still manifests) itself in the discredit-
ing of and disdain for practice and practitioners. To some, already the very
meaning of the notion “applied” carries a negative connotation, as is suggested
by the contrast between the widely used synonym for “theoretical”, i.e. “pure”
(as used, e.g. in the distinction between “Pure” and “Applied Mathematics”)
and its natural antonym “impure”. On a different level, a lower academic status
sometimes is attributed to applied disciplines because of their alleged lack of
originality – they are perceived as simply and one-directionally applying in-
sights gained in basic research and watering them down by neglecting the limit-
ing conditions under which these insights were achieved.
Today, however, the academic system is confronted with a new understand-
ing of science. In politics, in society and, above all, in economy a new concept
of science has gained acceptance which questions traditional views. In recent
philosophy of science, this is labelled as “science under the pressure to suc-
ceed” – i.e. as science whose theoretical structure and criteria of evaluation are
increasingly conditioned by the pressure of application (Carrier, Stöltzner, and
Wette 2004):

vi Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos
Whenever the public is interested in a particular subject, e.g. when a new disease de-
velops that cannot be cured by conventional medication, the public requests science
to provide new insights in this area as quickly as possible. In doing so, the public is
less interested in whether these new insights fit seamlessly into an existing theoretical
framework, but rather whether they make new methods of treatment and curing pos-
sible. (Institut für Wirtschafts- und Technikforschung 2004, our translation).
With most of the practical problems like these, sciences cannot rely on know-
ledge that is already available, simply because such knowledge does not yet
exist. Very often, the problems at hand do not fit neatly into the theoretical
framework of one particular “pure science”, and there is competition among dis-
ciplines with respect to which one provides the best theoretical and methodo-
logical resources for potential solutions. And more often than not the problems
can be tackled only by adopting an interdisciplinary approach.
As a result, the traditional “Cascade Model”, where insights were applied
top-down from basic research to practice, no longer works in many cases. In-
stead, a kind of “application oriented basic research” is needed, where disci-
plines – conditioned by the pressure of application – take up a certain still dif-
fuse practical issue, define it as a problem against the background of their
respective theoretical and methodological paradigms, study this problem and
finally develop various application oriented suggestions for solutions. In this
sense, applied science, on the one hand, has to be conceived of as a scientific
strategy for problem solving – a strategy that starts from mundane practical
problems and ultimately aims at solving them. On the other hand, despite the
dominance of application that applied sciences are subjected to, as sciences they
can do nothing but develop such solutions in a theoretically reflected and me-
thodologically well founded manner. The latter, of course, may lead to the well-
known fact that even applied sciences often tend to concentrate on “application
oriented basic research” only and thus appear to lose sight of the original prac-
tical problem. But despite such shifts in focus: Both the boundaries between
disciplines and between pure and applied research are getting more and more
blurred.
Today, after the turn of the millennium, it is obvious that sciences are re-
quested to provide more and something different than just theory, basic research
or pure knowledge. Rather, sciences are increasingly being regarded as partners
in a more comprehensive social and economic context of problem solving and
are evaluated against expectations to be practically relevant. This also implies
that sciences are expected to be critical, reflecting their impact on society. This
new “applied” type of science is confronted with the question: Which role can
the sciences play in solving individual, interpersonal, social, intercultural,
political or technical problems? This question is typical of a conception of
science that was especially developed and propagated by the influential philos-
opher Sir Karl Popper – a conception that also this handbook series is based on.

Introduction to the handbook series vii
2. “Applied Linguistics”: Concepts and controversies
The concept of “Applied Linguistics” is not as old as the notion of “Applied
Science”, but it has also been problematical in its relation to theoretical lin-
guistics since its beginning. There seems to be a widespread consensus that the
notion “Applied Linguistics” emerged in 1948 with the first issue of the journal
Language Learning which used this compound in its subtitle A Quarterly Jour-
nal of Applied Linguistics. This history of its origin certainly explains why even
today “Applied Linguistics” still tends to be predominantly associated with
foreign language teaching and learning in the Anglophone literature in particu-
lar, as can bee seen e.g. from Johnson and Johnson (1998), whose Encyclopedic
Dictionary of Applied Linguistics is explicitly subtitled A Handbook for Lan-
guage Teaching. However, this theory of origin is historically wrong. As is
pointed out by Back (1970), the concept of applying linguistics can be traced
back to the early 19th century in Europe, and the very notion “Applied Lin-
guistics” was used in the early 20th already.
2.1. Theoretically Applied vs. Practically Applied Linguistics
As with the relation between “Pure” and “Applied” sciences pointed out above,
also with “Applied Linguistics” the first question to be asked is what makes it
different from “Pure” or “Theoretical Linguistics”. It is not surprising, then, that
the terminologist Back takes this difference as the point of departure for his dis-
cussion of what constitutes “Applied Linguistics”. In the light of recent contro-
versies about this concept it is no doubt useful to remind us of his terminological
distinctions.
Back (1970) distinguishes between “Theoretical Linguistics” – which aims
at achieving knowledge for its own sake, without considering any other value –,
“Practice” – i.e. any kind of activity that serves to achieve any purpose in life in
the widest sense, apart from the striving for knowledge for its own sake – and
“Applied Linguistics”, as a being based on “Theoretical Linguistics” on the one
hand and as aiming at usability in “Practice” on the other. In addition, he makes
a difference between “Theoretical Applied Linguistics” and “Practical Applied
Linguistics”, which is of particular interest here. The former is defined as the use
of insights and methods of “Theoretical Linguistics” for gaining knowledge in
another, non-linguistic discipline, such as ethnology, sociology, law or literary
studies, the latter as the application of insights from linguistics in a practical
field related to language, such as language teaching, translation, and the like.
For Back, the contribution of applied linguistics is to be seen in the planning
of practical action. Language teaching, for example, is practical action done
by practitioners, and what applied linguistics can contribute to this is, e.g., to
provide contrastive descriptions of the languages involved as a foundation for

viii Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos
teaching methods. These contrastive descriptions in turn have to be based on the
descriptive methods developed in theoretical linguistics.
However, in the light of the recent epistemological developments outlined
above, it may be useful to reinterpret Back’s notion of “Theoretically Applied
Linguistics”. As he himself points out, dealing with practical problems can have
repercussions on the development of the theoretical field. Often new ap-
proaches, new theoretical concepts and new methods are a prerequisite for deal-
ing with a particular type of practical problems, which may lead to an – at least
in the beginning – “application oriented basic research” in applied linguistics
itself, which with some justification could also be labelled “theoretically ap-
plied”, as many such problems require the transgression of disciplinary bound-
aries. It is not rare that a domain of “Theoretically Applied Linguistics” or “ap-
plication oriented basic research” takes on a life of its own, and that also
something which is labelled as “Applied Linguistics” might in fact be rather re-
mote from the mundane practical problems that originally initiated the respect-
ive subject area. But as long as a relation to the original practical problem can be
established, it may be justified to count a particular field or discussion as be-
longing to applied linguistics, even if only “theoretically applied”.
2.2. Applied linguistics as a response to structuralism and generativism
As mentioned before, in the Anglophone world in particular the view still
appears to be widespread that the primary concerns of the subject area of ap-
plied linguistics should be restricted to second language acquisition and lan-
guage instruction in the first place (see, e.g., Davies 1999 or Schmitt and Celce-
Murcia 2002). However, in other parts of the world, and above all in Europe,
there has been a development away from aspects of language learning to a wider
focus on more general issues of language and communication.
This broadening of scope was in part a reaction to the narrowing down the
focus in linguistics that resulted from self-imposed methodological constraints
which, as Ehlich (1999) points out, began with Saussurean structuralism and
culminated in generative linguistics. For almost three decades since the late
1950s, these developments made “language” in a comprehensive sense, as
related to the everyday experience of its users, vanish in favour of an idealised
and basically artificial entity. This led in “Core” or theoretical linguistics to a
neglect of almost all everyday problems with language and communication en-
countered by individuals and societies and made it necessary for those inter-
ested in socially accountable research into language and communication to draw
on a wider range of disciplines, thus giving rise to a flourishing of interdiscipli-
nary areas that have come to be referred to as hyphenated variants of linguistics,
such as sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, psycholinguistics, conversation
analysis, pragmatics, and so on (Davies and Elder 2004).

Introduction to the handbook series ix
That these hyphenated variants of linguistics can be said to have originated
from dealing with problems may lead to the impression that they fall completely
into the scope of applied linguistics. This the more so as their original thematic
focus is in line with a frequently quoted definition of applied linguistics as “the
theoretical and empirical investigation of real world problems in which lan-
guage is a central issue” (Brumfit 1997: 93). However, in the recent past much
of the work done in these fields has itself been rather “theoretically applied” in
the sense introduced above and ultimately even become mainstream in lin-
guistics. Also, in view of the current epistemological developments that see all
sciences under the pressure of application, one might even wonder if there is
anything distinctive about applied linguistics at all.
Indeed it would be difficult if not impossible to delimit applied linguistics
with respect to the practical problems studied and the disciplinary approaches
used: Real-world problems with language (to which, for greater clarity, should
be added: “with communication”) are unlimited in principle. Also, many prob-
lems of this kind are unique and require quite different approaches. Some
might be tackled successfully by applying already available linguistic theo-
ries and methods. Others might require for their solution the development of
new methods and even new theories. Following a frequently used distinction
first proposed by Widdowson (1980), one might label these approaches
as “Linguistics Applied” or “Applied Linguistics”. In addition, language is
a trans-disciplinary subject par excellence, with the result that problems do not
come labelled and may require for their solution the cooperation of various dis-
ciplines.
2.3. Conceptualisations and communities
The questions of what should be its reference discipline and which themes,
areas of research and sub-disciplines it should deal with, have been discussed
constantly and were also the subject of an intensive debate (e.g. Seidlhofer
2003). In the recent past, a number of edited volumes on applied linguistics have
appeared which in their respective introductory chapters attempt at giving
a definition of “Applied Linguistics”. As can be seen from the existence of the
Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquée (AILA) and its numerous
national affiliates, from the number of congresses held or books and journals
published with the label “Applied Linguistics”, applied linguistics appears to be
a well-established and flourishing enterprise. Therefore, the collective need felt
by authors and editors to introduce their publication with a definition of the sub-
ject area it is supposed to be about is astonishing at first sight. Quite obviously,
what Ehlich (2006) has termed “the struggle for the object of inquiry” appears to
be characteristic of linguistics – both of linguistics at large and applied lin-
guistics. Its seems then, that the meaning and scope of “Applied Linguistics”

x Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos
cannot be taken for granted, and this is why a wide variety of controversial con-
ceptualisations exist.
For example, in addition to the dichotomy mentioned above with respect to
whether approaches to applied linguistics should in their theoretical foundations
and methods be autonomous from theoretical linguistics or not, and apart from
other controversies, there are diverging views on whether applied linguistics is
an independent academic discipline (e.g. Kaplan and Grabe 2000) or not (e.g.
Davies and Elder 2004), whether its scope should be mainly restricted to lan-
guage teaching related topics (e.g. Schmitt and Celce-Murcia 2002) or not (e.g.
Knapp 2006), or whether applied linguistics is a field of interdisciplinary syn-
thesis where theories with their own integrity develop in close interaction with
language users and professionals (e.g. Rampton 1997/2003) or whether this
view should be rejected, as a true interdisciplinary approach is ultimately im-
possible (e.g. Widdowson 2005).
In contrast to such controversies Candlin and Sarangi (2004) point out that
applied linguistics should be defined in the first place by the actions of those
who practically do applied linguistics:
[…] we see no especial purpose in reopening what has become a somewhat sterile
debate on what applied linguistics is, or whether it is a distinctive and coherent
discipline. […] we see applied linguistics as a many centered and interdisciplinary
endeavour whose coherence is achieved in purposeful, mediated action by its prac-
titioners. […]
What we want to ask of applied linguistics is less what it is and more what it does, or
rather what its practitioners do. (Candlin/Sarangi 2004:1–2)
Against this background, they see applied linguistics as less characterised
by its thematic scope – which indeed is hard to delimit – but rather by the
two aspects of “relevance” and “reflexivity”. Relevance refers to the purpose
applied linguistic activities have for the targeted audience and to the degree that
these activities in their collaborative practices meet the background and needs
of those addressed – which, as matter of comprehensibility, also includes taking
their conceptual and language level into account. Reflexivity means the contex-
tualisation of the intellectual principles and practices, which is at the core of
what characterises a professional community, and which is achieved by asking
leading questions like “What kinds of purposes underlie what is done?”, “Who
is involved in their determination?”, “By whom, and in what ways, is their
achievement appraised?”, “Who owns the outcomes?”.
We agree with these authors that applied linguistics in dealing with real
world problems is determined by disciplinary givens – such as e.g. theories,
methods or standards of linguistics or any other discipline – but that it is deter-
mined at least as much by the social and situational givens of the practices of
life. These do not only include the concrete practical problems themselves but

Introduction to the handbook series xi
also the theoretical and methodological standards of cooperating experts from
other disciplines, as well as the conceptual and practical standards of the prac-
titioners who are confronted with the practical problems in the first place. Thus,
as Sarangi and van Leeuwen (2003) point out, applied linguists have to become
part of the respective “community of practice”.
If, however, applied linguists have to regard themselves as part of a commu-
nity of practice, it is obvious that it is the entire community which determines
what the respective subject matter is that the applied linguist deals with and
how. In particular, it is the respective community of practice which determines
which problems of the practitioners have to be considered. The consequence of
this is that applied linguistics can be understood from very comprehensive to
very specific, depending on what kind of problems are considered relevant by
the respective community. Of course, following this participative understanding
of applied linguistics also has consequences for the Handbooks of Applied Lin-
guistics both with respect to the subjects covered and the way they are theoreti-
cally and practically treated.
3. Applied linguistics for problem solving
Against this background, it seems reasonable not to define applied linguistics as
an autonomous discipline or even only to delimit it by specifying a set of sub-
jects it is supposed to study and typical disciplinary approaches it should use.
Rather, in line with the collaborative and participatory perspective of the com-
munities of practice applied linguists are involved in, this handbook series is
based on the assumption that applied linguistics is a specific, problem-oriented
way of “doing linguistics” related to the real-life world. In other words: applied
linguistics is conceived of here as “linguistics for problem solving”.
To outline what we think is distinctive about this area of inquiry: Entirely
in line with Popper’s conception of science, we take it that applied linguistics
starts from the assumption of an imperfect world in the areas of language and
communication. This means, firstly, that linguistic and communicative compet-
ence in individuals, like other forms of human knowledge, is fragmentary and
defective – if it exists at all. To express it more pointedly: Human linguistic and
communicative behaviour is not “perfect”. And on a different level, this imper-
fection also applies to the use and status of language and communication in and
among groups or societies.
Secondly, we take it that applied linguists are convinced that the imperfec-
tion both of individual linguistic and communicative behaviour and language
based relations between groups and societies can be clarified, understood and to
some extent resolved by their intervention, e.g. by means of education, training
or consultancy.

xii Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos
Thirdly, we take it that applied linguistics proceeds by a specific mode of
inquiry in that it mediates between the way language and communication is ex-
pertly studied in the linguistic disciplines and the way it is directly experienced
in different domains of use. This implies that applied linguists are able to dem-
onstrate that their findings – be they of a “Linguistics Applied” or “Applied
Linguistics” nature – are not just “application oriented basic research” but can
be made relevant to the real-life world.
Fourthly, we take it that applied linguistics is socially accountable. To the
extent that the imperfections initiating applied linguistic activity involve both
social actors and social structures, we take it that applied linguistics has to
be critical and reflexive with respect to the results of its suggestions and solu-
tions.
These assumptions yield the following questions which at the same time de-
fine objectives for applied linguistics:
1. Which linguistic problems are typical of which areas of language compet-
ence and language use?
2. How can linguistics define and describe these problems?
3. How can linguistics suggest, develop, or achieve solutions of these prob-
lems?
4. Which solutions result in which improvements in speakers’ linguistic and
communicative abilities or in the use and status of languages in and between
groups?
5. What are additional effects of the linguistic intervention?
4. Objectives of this handbook series
These questions also determine the objectives of this book series. However, in
view of the present boom in handbooks of linguistics and applied linguistics,
one should ask what is specific about this series of nine thematically different
volumes.
To begin with, it is important to emphasise what it is not aiming at:
– The handbook series does not want to take a snapshot view or even a “hit
list” of fashionable topics, theories, debates or fields of study.
– Nor does it aim at a comprehensive coverage of linguistics because some
selectivity with regard to the subject areas is both inevitable in a book series
of this kind and part of its specific profile.
Instead, the book series will try
– to show that applied linguistics can offer a comprehensive, trustworthy and
scientifically well-founded understanding of a wide range of problems,
– to show that applied linguistics can provide or develop instruments for solv-
ing new, still unpredictable problems,

Introduction to the handbook series xiii
– to show that applied linguistics is not confined to a restricted number of
topics such as, e.g. foreign language learning, but that it successfully deals
with a wide range of both everyday problems and areas of linguistics,
– to provide a state-of-the-art description of applied linguistics against the
background of the ability of this area of academic inquiry to provide de-
scriptions, analyses, explanations and, if possible, solutions of everyday
problems. On the one hand, this criterion is the link to trans-disciplinary co-
operation. On the other, it is crucial in assessing to what extent linguistics
can in fact be made relevant.
In short, it is by no means the intention of this series to duplicate the present
state of knowledge about linguistics as represented in other publications with
the supposed aim of providing a comprehensive survey. Rather, the intention is
to present the knowledge available in applied linguistics today firstly from an
explicitly problem solving perspective and secondly, in a non-technical, easily
comprehensible way. Also it is intended with this publication to build bridges to
neighbouring disciplines and to critically discuss which impact the solutions
discussed do in fact have on practice. This is particularly necessary in areas like
language teaching and learning – where for years there has been a tendency to
fashionable solutions without sufficient consideration of their actual impact on
the reality in schools.
5. Criteria for the selection of topics
Based on the arguments outlined above, the handbook series has the following
structure: Findings and applications of linguistics will be presented in concen-
tric circles, as it were, starting out from the communication competence of the
individual, proceeding via aspects of interpersonal and inter-group communi-
cation to technical communication and, ultimately, to the more general level of
society. Thus, the topics of the nine volumes are as follows:
1. Handbook of Individual Communication Competence
2. Handbook of Interpersonal Communication
3. Handbook of Communication in Organisations and Professions
4. Handbook of Communication in the Public Sphere
5. Handbook of Multilingualism and Multilingual Communication
6. Handbook of Foreign Language Communication and Learning
7. Handbook of Intercultural Communication
8. Handbook of Technical Communication
9. Handbook of Language and Communication: Diversity and Change
This thematic structure can be said to follow the sequence of experience with
problems related to language and communication a human passes through in the

xiv Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos
course of his or her personal biographical development. This is why the topic
areas of applied linguistics are structured here in ever-increasing concentric
circles: in line with biographical development, the first circle starts with
the communicative competence of the individual and also includes interper-
sonal communication as belonging to a person’s private sphere. The second
circle proceeds to the everyday environment and includes the professional and
public sphere. The third circle extends to the experience of foreign languages
and cultures, which at least in officially monolingual societies, is not made by
everybody and if so, only later in life. Technical communication as the fourth
circle is even more exclusive and restricted to a more special professional clien-
tele. The final volume extends this process to focus on more general, supra-in-
dividual national and international issues.
For almost all of these topics, there already exist introductions, handbooks
or other types of survey literature. However, what makes the present volumes
unique is their explicit claim to focus on topics in language and communication
as areas of everyday problems and their emphasis on pointing out the relevance
of applied linguistics in dealing with them.
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schaft’? Die Sprache 16: 21–53.
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Seidlhofer, Barbara (ed.)
2003 Controversies in Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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1984 [1980] Model and fictions. In: Henry Widdowson (1984) Explorations in Ap-
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xvi Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos

Contents
Introduction to the handbook series
Karlfried Knapp and Gerd Antos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v
Introduction: Framing Technical Communication
Alexander Mehler, Laurent Romary, and Dafydd Gibbon . . . . . . . . 1
I. Basic communication technologies & infrastructures
1. Document Authoring: from Word Processing to Text Generation
Aurélien Max . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2. Representation of Documents in Technical Communication
Sebastian Rahtz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3. Foundations of markup languages
Maik Stührenberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
4. Controlled Language Structures in Technical Communication
Thorsten Trippel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
5. Document Classification, Information Retrieval, Text and Web Mining
Gerhard Paaß . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
6. Multimodal and Speech Technology
Jean-Claude Martin and Tanja Schultz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
7. Resources for technical communication systems
Dafydd Gibbon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
8. Evaluation of Technical Communication
Peter Menke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
II. Technical communication management
9. Lexicography, terminology and ontologies
Serge Sharoff and Anthony Hartley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317

xviii Contents
10. Multilingual Computing
Felix Sasaki and Arle Lommel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347
11. Scholarly Communication
Laurent Romary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379
12. Verbal communication protocols in safety-critical system operations
Peter Bernard Ladkin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403
13. Multimodal Communication
Jens Allwood and Elisabeth Ahlsén . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435
14. Decentralized Online Social Networks
Nils Diewald . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 461
15. Digital Curation as Communication Mediation
Christopher A. Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 507
III. Communication by means of technology
16. Internet-Based Communication
Ulli Waltinger and Alexa Breuing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 533
17. Tutoring Systems and Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL)
Henning Lobin and Dietmar Rösler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 571
18. Framing Multimodal Technical Communication
Andy Lücking and Thies Pfeiffer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 591
19. Barrier-free communication
Petra Kubina and Andy Lücking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 645
20. Artificial Interactivity
Stefan Kopp and Ipke Wachsmuth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 707
21. Ubiquitous computing
Codrina Lauth, Bettina Berendt, Bastian Pfleging,
and Albrecht Schmidt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 735
22. P2P-based Communication
Gerhard Heyer, Florian Holz, and Sven Teresniak . . . . . . . . . . 771

Contents xix
Biographical notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 797
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 807

Introduction: Framing Technical Communication
Alexander Mehler, Laurent Romary, and Dafydd Gibbon
1. On the technical side of communication
The Handbook of Technical Communication brings together a selection of
topics that range from technical media in human communication to the lin-
guistic, multimodal enhancement of present-day technologies. It covers com-
puter-mediated text, voice and multimedia communication. In doing so, the
handbook takes professional and private communication into account. Special
emphasis is put on multimodal communication, its semiotic underpinning, stan-
dardized representation, automatic processing and evaluation in the process of
system development. Throughout the handbook, this is primarily done from a
technological point of view that puts emphasis on the underlying processing
technologies as well as on standards and formats of data representation in tech-
nical communication. Thus, basic communication technologies and infrastruc-
tures play a major role in this handbook. In summary, the handbook deals with
theoretical issues of technical communication, technology-enhanced communi-
cation and its practical impact on the development and usage of text and speech
as well as of multimodal technologies.
In order to give a blueprint of how the various fields of research on technical
communication collected by this handbook hang together, we start from a no-
tion of technical communication that integrates the notions of mediality, coda-
lity, modality, temporality and social complexity (see Figure 1). More specifi-
cally, we refer to five constituents in our notion of technical communication as
defined below:
1. Mediality in the range of mono- and multimediality: with the rise of hyper-
text and hypermedia (Bush, 1945; Nelson, 1995; Engelbart, 1995; Berners-
Lee, Hendler, and Lassila, 2001), multimedia has been a longstanding topic
in computer science and related disciplines (only recently being comple-
mented or even replaced by the topic of multimodality (Gibbon, Mertins,
and Moore, 2000)). Generally speaking, the term medium is used in two re-
spects: as a substance of information transmission and as a device of in-
formation storage (cf. Hess-Lüttich and Schmauks, 2004).1 However, what
is stored is designated to be received in the future and, thus, storage media
can be seen to serve as transmission media where the border between both
readings parallels the distinction between ephemeral and persistent (syn-
chronous, quasi-synchronous or asynchronous) transmission. An asyn-
chronous, non-face-to-face transmission necessarily requires the use of a

2 Alexander Mehler, Laurent Romary, and Dafydd Gibbon
technical device that renders the respective communication technical. In
any event, storage media do not necessarily determine the mode by which
the information being transferred is processed, nor do they necessarily
require a single code for encoding or decoding, respectively. Thus, we have
to distinguish two more reference points.
2. Codality in the range of mono- and multicodality: traditionally, linguistics
has been concerned with monocodal signs that are encoded according to a
single underlying language (or code). However, not only with the advent of
web-based communication and globalization we face multilingual docu-
ments that are obviously encoded by means of different codes and, thus, are
multicodal. By the same token, a crossmodal supersign (Kendon, 2004) or a
so called multimodal ensemble (Lücking, Mehler, and Menke, 2008) as, for
example, a supersign that consists of a linguistic sign and a gesture, is multi-
codal (though not multilingual) where the underlying codes require at least
two modes for producing and receiving its constituents. Thus, multicodal
signs of this sort inevitably fall into the realm of multimodality. Another
example of distinguishing mono- and multicodal signs relates to the auto-
Figure 1. A five dimensional decision matrix together with a candidate manifestation
in the form of the vector (CO = mim , ME = nin, SO = oio, TE = pip, MO = qiq).
As an example consider wiki-based technical communication that is charac-
terized by the signature mim = multicodal, nin = multimedial, oio = n:m, pip =
{quasi-synchronous, asynchronous}, nin = {monomodal production, multi-
modal reception}.

Introduction: Framing Technical Communication 3
matic annotation of documents based on information extraction technol-
ogies (Wilks, 1997; Feldman and Sanger, 2007) that are used, for example,
for automatic forecasting and algorithmic trading (Dang, Brabazon, Edel-
man, and O’Neill, 2009). In these cases, an algorithm based on some lan-
guage model implements an additional code that, if being successful, is used
to enrich the input documents informationally. It may be a question at issue
whether annotated documents are multicodal or just based on multiple au-
thors that are partially artificial. In any event, one has to consider that algo-
rithms do not necessarily use the same code as human authors even if the
output of the algorithms is input to algorithmic trading and, finally, to deci-
sion making by humans.
3. Modality in the range of mono- and multimodality: the modality of a com-
munication concerns the sensory interfaces that the communicators use to
perform this communication. In this sense, a communication is called multi-
modal, if at least one communicator uses at least two different sensory in-
terfaces for sign production or reception.2 One may argue that any com-
munication is multimodal since one never uses the same interface for both
sign production and reception. However, if we make an additional distinc-
tion it is evident that monomodal production and monomodal reception are
quite common.
Note that we call a communication (i) mono- or multimodal, (ii) mono- or
multimedial, (iii) mono- or multicodal where the reference point of such at-
tributions is (i) the sign producer or recipient, (ii) the transmission or storage
medium being used and (iii) the sign system(s) being manifested (cf. Wei-
denmann, 1997). Note also that we may speak of multimodal, multimedial
or multicodal signs: on the token level this means to select one of the latter
reference points in order to stress the singularity or multiplicity of the codes,
media or modes manifested by the tokens under consideration.
The three reference points of classifying communications introduced so far are,
so to speak, orthogonal. This is demonstrated, for example, by multimedial
documents that consist of graphically manifested texts and sound tracks that can
be received in a monomodal fashion if the texts are read aloud by means of some
speech synthesis. Further, a multimodal discourse in which gesture accom-
panies speech can be digitized and transferred by means of a single medium that
captures both the visual and acoustical data stream. Thirdly, a multilingual in-
struction manual can be monomedially stored and monomodally received. It is
evident how we may extend this list of examples that keep the communicators,
transmission media and codes apart as different reference points of classifying
communications. We continue this classification by means of two additional ref-
erence points:

4. Temporality in the range of synchronicity, quasi-synchronicity, and asyn-
chronicity: none of the reference points distinguished so far explicitly refers
to the notion of time as being constitutive for any act of communication.
However, in reviewing the classical model of conceptual speech and writing
as introduced by Koch and Oesterreicher (cf. Koch and Oesterreicher,
2001), Dürscheid (2003) stresses the need to distinguish what she calls
mediality, that is, what we call temporality. The reason for this notional
add-on is to distinguish communication situations along the synchronicity
or asynchronicity of turn-taking. Along this line of reasoning, Dürscheid
distinguishes between synchronous communications (of immediate or even
overlapping turn-taking in shared communication situations), quasi-syn-
chronous communications (in which turn-taking is marginally stretched so
that feedback among communicators is slightly restricted), and asynchro-
nous communications (where the communication situation is significantly
stretched so that a common frame of communication can hardly be as-
sumed). Below we shall see how this criterion of temporality combines with
those of mediality, modality and codality. However, before we do that, we
need to make a final distinction.
5. Social complexity in the range of monades, dyads, triads, and large social
groups (aka communities): Traditionally, linguistics had to do with written
documents that were mainly produced for mass communication (Wehner,
1997) where single text producers addressed large social groups of com-
municators (Brinker, Antos, Heinemann, and Sager, 2000). During the
1970’s, dialogical communication came into the fore of linguistic research,
consequently focusing on dyads of interlocutors (Brinker and Sager, 2006).
Even more recently, linguistics started looking at triads or tiny groups of
persons that together perform so called multilogues (Ginzburg and Fernan-
dez, 2005). Thus, we observe a rise in social complexity that starts from
monologues and dialogues to finally reach the level of so called multilogues.
What is missed in these approaches is a more comprehensive account of the
social complexity of communication in terms of one-to-one, one-to-many
and many-to-many relations as they are prototypically observed in face-to-
face communication (1:1), mass communication (1:n), and web-based col-
laboration (n:m). Any account of technical communication has to consider
this social dimension (cf. Zerubavel, 2003) – otherwise it fails to clarify the
peculiarities of technological enhancements of, say, collaborative writing as
currently provided by wiki-based systems (Leuf and Cunningham, 2001;
Stegbauer, 2009). With the rise of web-based communication, we observe
an increase of the social complexity of communication that has to be re-
flected by any account of technical communication.

One may ask why such a high-dimensional, parameter-rich space is needed to
clarify the notion of technical communication. The reason is that technological
means of communication have pervaded human communication, modifying it in
various, but insufficiently classified, ways. By addressing one of these five ref-
erence points we can classify different approaches to technical communication
by their semiotic differentia specifica. In order to see this, we consider three
combinations of these reference points that are accompanied by specific tech-
nologies that render the corresponding communication technical in a very spe-
cific sense:
1. The case of collaborative writing: wikis (e.g., Wikipedia) allow for a form
of collaborative writing that uses distributed computer-based media for pro-
ducing, storing, transferring and receiving the contributions of their “wi-
kilocutors”. From the point of view of reception, this sort of collaborative
writing is primarily monomodal since contributions of wikilocutors are
mainly textual. Exceptions occur, for example, in the form of sound tracks
or when speech synthesis is used for reading written contributions aloud so
that in principle we face a situation of multimodal reception. Further, in
large Wikipedias (e.g., the English or German ones) that contain citations in
many languages, multicodality is the norm. In terms of temporality, wikis
allow for quasi-synchronous as well as asynchronous communication: in the
former case an author’s contribution may be removed or further processed
quickly by her collaborators, while in the latter case a textual contribution
may stay unchanged for years before being modified by other wikilocutors.
This temporal peculiarity of wikis relates to their dual nature as storage and
transmission media (as, e.g., in the case of highly disputed discussions (Wat-
tenberg, Viégas, and Hollenbach, 2007; Laniado, Tasso, Volkovich, and
Kaltenbrunner, 2011; Gómez, Kappen, and Kaltenbrunner, 2011)). How-
ever, what makes wikis an exceptional case of technical communication is
their social complexity, which ranges from manifesting mass communi-
cation (where articles are authored by single authors, but received by large
audiences (Mehler and Sutter, 2008)) to collaborative writing and edit wars
(where articles are authored by many authors in the role of content pro-
viders, removers or defenders (Brandes, Kenis, Lerner, and Raaij, 2009)).
Here, technology plays the role of enabling a sort of collaborative writing
where, in principle, communicators can work on the same texts at different
points in time at different locations – irrespective of how distant they are in
terms of space and time. That is, wiki technologies are not just a means for
externalizing our social memory of texts and their intertextual relations
(Sager, 1997). They also allow for suspending the time-space continuity of
face-to-face communication (Zerubavel, 2003) in terms of multilogues.
They do so by enabling a multitude of communicators to adopt both the role

of text recipients and text producers concerning the same texts irrespective
of their time-space discontinuity. Thus, we may speak of an externalization
of collaborative sign processing in social groups that is enabled by wiki
technologies and that extends immediate peer-to-peer learning (Rieger,
2003) to mediate collaborative learning in groups. This example shows that
beyond the trias of codality, mediality and modality, temporality and social
complexity are indispensable reference points of characterizing the pecu-
liarity of technical communication as enabled by wikis. Of course, collab-
orative story-telling and social memorizing existed before the advent of
wikis; however, wikis allow for externalizing these processes in terms of
quasi-synchronous and asynchronous collaborative writing. Obviously, this
is a step forward in the development of technical communication.
2. The case of ubiquitous computing: The term ‘ubiquitous computing’ means,
literally, ‘computing anywhere’, sometimes also ‘computing everywhere’ or
‘omnipresent computing’ (see Chapter 21, ‘Ubiquitous Computing’ for a
comprehensive overview of this topic). The field of ubiquitous computing
arose with the emergence of small mobile computing devices such as laptop
computers, PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) and multifunction cell-
phones in the 1990s. In the meantime the field has developed into a very
broad spectrum of interactive wireless systems with internet-connected
smartphones, cameras and audio players, GPS-based location coordinating
software applications, automatic RFID (Radio Frequency Identification)
shopping checkout, and industrial, military and domestic ‘smart environ-
ment’ control by means of proximity detection of moving agents. Each of
these different kinds of ubiquitous computing uses a different specification
of the 5-dimensional decision space of classifying technical communication
as presented in Figure 1. For example, collaborative game players using
smartphones will typically work with the following (simplified) specifi-
cation: they preferably communicate synchronously (temporal complexity)
(of course, smartphones also allow for quasi-synchronous and even asyn-
chronous communication) using touch-activated screens (multimediality) in
order to produce and process signs in different (audio, visual and tactile)
modes (multimodality) in a competitive, at least dialogical (1:1) or even
multilogical (n:m) manner (social complexity). What is characteristic for
this example of ubiquitous computing is the enhancement that it provides
for multimodal computing especially in situations of quasi-synchronous
communication. In these situations, the space continuity of the interlocutors
is suspended. Ubiquitous computing implies more than just particular tech-
nologies, however. In the technical coding dimension, ubiquitous comput-
ing is dependent on standardization of interoperable interfaces and inter-de-
vice as well as human-machine communication protocols (see the discussion
of aircraft and train control in Chapter 12, ‘Verbal Communication Proto-

cols in Safety-Critical System Operations’). Further, in the social dimen-
sion, the ‘invisible’ or ‘implicit’ identification procedures which are often
involved in ubiquitous communication raise problematic ethical issues of
technology-driven changes in privacy concepts, which are the topic of con-
tinuing controversy. In any event, ubiquitous computing stresses the multi-
modal variety of communication thereby opening up many new areas of ap-
plication of technical communication.
3. The case of adaptable hypermedia: The third example covers so called
adaptable hypermedia (Brusilovsky, 1996).3 These have been proposed as a
class of dynamic hypertexts that allow for their continual adaptation subject
to their usage. An example of such a system has been given by O’Donnell,
Mellish, Oberlander, and Knott (2001) who argue for hypermedia systems
that adapt even the wording of single hypertext modules (Storrer, 2002) to
the needs, usage habits or interests of their recipients (so that, for example,
beginners are provided text that is accessible at a high level of readability).
As a result, different hypertexts are generated for different readers that may
reflect the social, cognitive or situational specifics of their usage – with re-
spect to form and content. Even though this is a historical example (since
this technology has been replaced by a completely different development of
the web), it is worth considering the kind of complexity of this sort of tech-
nical communication according to Figure 1. Evidently, adaptable hyper-
media are multimedial and require multimodal reception by definition.
However, they are simple as far as their social complexity is concerned: al-
though single users can influence the generation of hypertexts being pre-
sented to them, this mainly works in terms of a filter mechanism for which
the system specifies the space of possible states it can take up in advance. As
a consequence, an adaptable system of this sort hardly enhances communi-
cation among different users. If at all, this relates to modeling types of users
(e.g., beginners, experts etc.) and, thus, to a sort of typological interrelation
of users who are supposed to “interact” in similar ways with the system
(Mehler, 2009). From this perspective, it is no surprise that the web took a
different development toward collaborative media as exemplified by Wiki-
pedia. In any event, there are recent developments that aim at unifying the
semantic web (Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila, 2001) (see also Waltinger
and Breuing (2012) in this volume) and wikis (Leuf and Cunningham, 2001)
in terms of so called semantic wikis in order to allow for a kind of collabor-
ative writing under the control of a semantic model as provided by semantic
web technologies (Schaffert, Bischof, Bürger, Gruber, Hilzensauer, and
Schaffert, 2006; Völkel, Krötzsch, Vrandecic, Haller, and Studer, 2006;
Hammwöhner, 2007; Baer, Erbs, Zesch, and Gurevych, 2011). This may end
up in a revival of notions of adaptive hypermedia under the header of the
semantic web and Web 2.0 technologies.

These three examples stress different reference points of the complexity of tech-
nical communication as shown in Figure 1: wikis point to the social complexity
of collaborative writing while ubiquitous computing relates to the complexity
of multimodal interfaces. Finally, adaptive hypermedia and semantic wikis em-
phasize the potential for development of technical writing even in settings with
a focus on classical, monomedial texts. Any such development raises the ques-
tion for the combinability of manifestations along the reference points distin-
guished in Figure 1. Equivalently, any such development challenges the limits
of multimodal fusion and fission as well as of the codal, medial, temporal and
social complexity of communication. The present handbook’s chapters provide
insights into such a drawing of boundaries.
Note that technologies are a means to resolving constraints of our embodi-
ment (cf. Eco’s notion of prostheses in Eco, 1988). Technologies are also a pre-
requisite for making available even the ephemeral traces that communication
leaves behind – regarding any of the reference points considered so far. That is,
without technical media for transferring or storing these traces, research, for
example, on the social complexity of collaborative writing, on the conversa-
tional unfolding of microblogging or on the alignment (Pickering and Garrod,
2004; Rickheit, 2005) of interlocutors in multimodal face-to-face communi-
cation (Ruiter, Rossignol, Vuurpijl, Cunningham, and Levelt, 2003) would
hardly be possible. Because technical communication is an indispensable chan-
nel still under development, it is now possible to study communication to its full
semiotic extent – as described and foreseen in the comprehensive handbook on
semiotics edited by Posner, Robering, and Seboek (1996).
In order to systematize our examples just given look again at Figure 1. It
shows the reference points of classifying communication situations as con-
sidered so far. Our basic idea is to call a communication technical if any of the
attribute values selected along these reference points is affected by some tech-
nology (e.g., enhanced, replaced, complemented, augmented, accelerated, con-
trolled, managed or otherwise modified).4 That is, the technologies in use may
primarily focus on enhancing the reception or the production of signs (as in the
case of barrier-free communication – see Kubina and Lücking (2012) in this
handbook) (i.e., the aspect of modality). Alternatively, they may focus on en-
hancing the storage and transmission of data (as in the case of semantic in-
formation retrieval – see Paaß (2012) in this handbook) (i.e., the aspect of medi-
ality in Figure 1). Further, technologies may essentially address the problem of
handling documents that contain signs of multiple languages or to adopt mono-
codal texts to the needs of different language communities (as in the area of
multilingual computing – see Sasaki and Lommel (2012) in this volume) (i.e.,
the aspect of codality). Further, we have to think of digital curation (see Lee
(2012) in this handbook) that seeks technologies that allow for using present-
day digital artifacts (e.g., computer games, wikis, or blogs) by future gener-

ations – even under comparable conditions subject to which they are currently
used (i.e., the aspect of temporality). Obviously, this is an extreme example of
the temporal complexity of technical communication, where the addressee of
the communicative act is yet not alive. Finally, the main focus of technologies in
technical communication may relate to the social complexity of communication
(as in decentralized social networks and wiki media – see Diewald (2012) and
Waltinger and Breuing (2012) both in this volume) (i.e., the aspect of social
complexity).
Of course, technologies may provide enhancements along different dimen-
sions at the same time and hardly realize a single such focus. Such a multiple
classification is reflected in Figure 1 by example of wikis that manifest a certain
selection of attribute values along our list of five reference points (see above).
This results in a signature of the peculiarity of wikis in terms of technical com-
munication. The idea is to perform the same classificatory procedure for any
other sort of technical communication. As this is an open development, no one
can foresee what combinations will become relevant and what further reference
points will be needed to account for the rapid enhancements and modifications
of our every-day technical communication. In any event, this handbook intends
to provide a snapshot of this ongoing development. It collects contributions to
the following areas of technical communication:
– technical foundations of technical communication
– standardization
– linguistic computing
– multilingual computing
– multimodal computing
– talking computers (speech recognition, speech synthesis)
– language and speaker identification
– artificial interactivity
– barrier-free communication
– assistive technologies for motor and sensory communication impairments
– distributed social networks
– peer-to-peer communication
As any non-wiki-based handbook necessarily makes a selection of certain
topics, we hope the reader will find our selections rich and thought-provoking,
even if we have not included every relevant theme. We believe in collaborative
writing and ask the reader to follow the references given at the end of each
chapter and to consult Wikipedia as a continually enhanced encyclopedia that
because of its temporal and social scale can better document recent develop-
ments in the rapidly changing field of technical communication. In any event,
the present handbook may help to get first insights and references for some of
the main fields of research in this area.

2. Overview of the book
The handbook on technical communication is divided into three parts and 22
chapters. While Part I focuses on technologies, the management of communi-
cation and its technology-based enhancement are dealt with in Part II and III re-
spectively.
Part I starts with overviewing basic technologies that are used in various
fields of technological communication. This includes technologies for docu-
ment representation and document analysis as well as technologies for handling
multimodal data and speech data in technical systems that accompany, augment
or even enhance oral and other kinds of face-to-face communication. Part I dis-
tinguishes between the generation (Chapter 1), the representation (Chapter 2, 3
and 4), the classification (Chapter 5) as well as the management and retrieval of
mono- and multimodal documents (Chapter 5 and Chapter 6). It mirrors the
two-fold nature of data in technical communication, which, historically, started
with text-based systems in order to enter the full range of multimodal communi-
cation between humans and their artificial companions. Special emphasis is put
in Part I on resources – such as corpora and machine readable dictionaries – for
training, testing and evaluating technical communication systems (Chapter 7).
The thorough evaluation of these systems by means of automatic, semi-auto-
matic or purely intellectual procedures is dealt with by a special chapter
(Chapter 8). Part I is the most technical part of the handbook: some of its
chapters can be read as thorough introductions to the respective field of research
with a focus on representation formats or on state-of-the-art technologies for
processing corresponding data. All other chapters of the handbook take profit of
these introductions by referring to these selected chapters as references for the
respective technologies. As it stands, no handbook can give comprehensive
overviews of all relevant fields of research or application. In any event, the in-
terested reader is asked to consult the technical literature cited in these chapters
to get further information.
Part II of the handbook covers seven chapters that focus on the management
of technical communication in different application areas. These areas range
from lexicography (including terminology and ontology management) via
multilingual communication, and scientific communication to the usage of con-
trolled languages in risk and security management. Ontologies have been in-
vented as representation formats that enable automatic, semantic (inference-
driven) data processing. Hence, ontologies play an important role in any area of
technical communication that has to do with processing linguistic data
(Chapter 9). In any event, processing linguistic data has to face the variety of
languages due to the globalization of technical communication. Thus, Part 2
puts special emphasis on multilingual computing (Chapter 9). This includes the
localization of technical systems, that is, procedures by which content and soft-

ware systems are provided in multiple languages. Beyond multilinguality,
multimodality is one of the areas of current development of technical communi-
cation whose semiotic underpinning is described in Chapter 13. This chapter
complements the more technological basing point of multimodality as provided
by Chapter 6 in that it looks at multimodal communication strategies in human-
machine communication. Chapter 11, Chapter 12 and Chapter 14 give over-
views of three areas of the management of technical communication. This tri-
partite overview starts with scholarly communication (Chapter 11) with a
special emphasis on digital libraries and current developments in scientific
communication. It is complemented by an example-driven survey of technical
communication in safety-critical systems (Chapter 12). With the advent of the
web, ever new technical media for communication arise. Most recently, this in-
cludes so called decentralized online social networks. The handbook reflects
this very important and still upcoming area of technical communication by
means of Chapter 14. Last but not least, technical media can be seen as devices
not only for externalizing the human memory, but also for archiving semiotic
data for future generations (see above). Chapter 15 is about this aspect of tech-
nical “communication” between the past, the present and the future. It does so
from the point of view of digital curation, that is, the technical management of
artifacts for future use.
Part III complements the handbook by surveying 7 areas of technology-
enhanced communication. The first of these chapters focuses on Internet-based
communication and Web 2.0 technologies together with their impact on techni-
cal communication and documentation (Chapter 16). Technology-enhanced
learning and especially computer-assisted language learning is the topic of
Chapter 17. A central aspect of technology-enhanced communication relates to
the communication of human beings with artificial agents. This is the topic of
Chapter 18 and 20. Both of these chapters continue the handbook’s subtopic
multimodal communication, however, with an emphasis on multimodal fusion
(in the course of understanding multimodal data) and multimodal fission (in the
course of producing multimodal data). A classical area of technology-enhanced
communication is barrier-free communication that is dealt with by Chapter 19.
Starting from the comprehensive overview on multimodal communication
given in this handbook, this chapter distinguishes handicaps and impairments of
human beings together with corresponding technologies for bridging them in
communication. Two novel developmental branches of technical communi-
cation are given with ubiquitous computing (Chapter 21) and P2P-computing
(Chapter 22). Whereas the former accounts for the pervasion of computing tech-
nologies in everyday activities, the latter utilizes the notion of agent or peer net-
works for the distributed processing of data, say, in information retrieval. The
handbook ends with these two application areas. They exemplify upcoming
areas of human communication that once started from non-technology-en-

hanced face-to-face communication in order to reach the area of cloud comput-
ing, artificial interactivity and related fields of application where even machines
can serve as turn-takers. Obviously, this is an ongoing development whose des-
tination is not foreseeable.
In the following sections, the 22 chapters of this handbook are summarized
in detail.
2.1. Part I: basic communication technologies & infrastructures
In Chapter 1 (“Document authoring: from word processing to text gener-
ation”), Aurélien Max presents the various methods that have been progress-
ively developed to accompany the authoring of text in technical domains. Ar-
ticulating the topics around the document creation workflow, the chapter tackles
all aspects of document control, from purely formatting (or structural) aspects
to the linguistic checking of content. A last section addresses the issue of natural
language generation whether fully automated or interactive. Together with
Chapter 2, 3, 4 and 5 of this handbook, this chapter is mainly about written com-
munication with a focus on monomedial documents.
Chapter 2 by Sebastian Rahtz (“Representation of Documents in Techni-
cal Documentation”) covers the various aspects of the representation of docu-
ments in digital formats. Starting with an analysis of the various levels at which
a document can be construed, and identifying the correlation between the syn-
tactic (and layout) representation of a document with its underlying semantic,
Sebastian Rahtz surveys the various existing formats and standards currently
deployed in the industrial and the academic communities (TeX and XML based
formats such as the HTML, TEI, DocBook, OpenXML or ODF).
Complementing the preceding chapter, Chapter 3 (“Foundations of mar-
kup languages”) by Maik Stührenberg provides an in-depth presentation of
XML technology, as used in a variety of representational contexts. Starting with
the notion of a semi-structured document and eliciting the class of digital objects
that can be thus represented, the author shows in detail the theoretical and tech-
nical background of the XML recommendation, addressing in particular issues
related to expressivity (overlapping, pointing) and parsing (schema languages).
In Chapter 4 (“Controlled language structures in technical communi-
cation”), Thorsten Trippel reflects on the various domains where controlled
languages maybe used to enforce unambiguous meaning in technical communi-
cation. After an overview of the traditional domain, e.g. technical writing,
where controlled languages have been in use for years, the author covers more
recent aspects where digital content management requires the handling of con-
trolled languages to ascertain the semantics of digital content. Covering issues
related to controlled vocabularies, metadata languages and data categories for
data modeling, the chapter provides a systematic link with the corresponding

standardization activities. Although this chapter is mainly about written com-
munication, controlled languages are also more and more important for enhanc-
ing multimodal communication by technical means, a topic that is thoroughly
treated by several chapters in this handbook.
In Chapter 5 (“Document Classification, Information Retrieval, Text &
Web Mining”), Gerhard Paaß surveys state-of-the-art technologies of data min-
ing and information retrieval with a focus on textual units. The chapter deals
with quantitative models of documents in written communication and their util-
ization for various tasks such as text classification, topic detection and tracking,
topic clustering and labeling, word sense disambiguation, co-reference reso-
lution, relation extraction and semantic retrieval. The latter technologies are
called semantic as they do not require that search queries and retrieved docu-
ments share search terms; rather, they are required to contain semantically re-
lated or at least similar terms where semantic similarity is computed in terms of
a distributional approach (Harris, 1954; Landauer and Dumais, 1997; Turney
and Pantel, 2010). In such a way, the chapter touches a deep problem in tech-
nology-enhanced communication where the technology needs to “understand”
the semiotic output of human beings in order to better serve their needs. As it
stands, monomodal, monomedial written communication (including multicodal
documents) will be the first area of real progress in solving this task. Conse-
quently, the chapter includes the rising area of ontology mining. In so doing, it
provides a reference for the interested reader for any related chapter on lexical
resources, controlled languages, terminologies and lexicography within this
handbook.5 A central part of the chapter relates to the distinction of supervised
and unsupervised machine learning. In this regard, the chapter surveys standard
methods in text and web mining. Starting from the automatic preprocessing of
documents, this includes, amongst others, clustering methods, kernel methods
and conditional random fields that are used, for example, for automatically an-
notating text constituents (e.g., as named entities) in written communication.
This sort of semantic annotation is an indispensable step towards advanced
technologies, for example, in technical documentation, multilingual computing
or, more generally, in computational humanities. It is called semantic as the in-
formation being annotated concerns the semantic interpretation of text consti-
tuents. Advancements in technical communication will critically depend on
achievements in automatizing such interpretations that heretofore constituted
the domain of human expertise.6
The topic of multimodal communication, i.e. communication with more
than one human output-input channel such as speech and gesture, is pervasive in
the handbook, and addressed in Chapter 6 (“Multimodal and Speech Tech-
nology”) from the technological perspective by Jean-Claude Martin and Tanja
Schultz, combining the issue of multimodality with that of multilinguality. Lan-
guage specific problems such as typological differences in sound and writing

systems and word types, and technological problems such as the lack of data
and missing orthographic standards are discussed and technical strategies for
solving these problems are presented. Spoken dialogue systems are addressed in
detail, as well as new areas such as the recognition of emotion, personality,
workload stress and multimodal speaker recognition and tracking. Finally, ap-
proaches to and applications of multimodal interfaces are discussed.
Technical communication systems require resources for development in the
form of raw data, systematized data, tools for data processing and standardized
archiving. In Chapter 7 (“Resources for Technical Communication Sys-
tems”), Dafydd Gibbon defines technical communication systems as devices or
device networks which intervene in the communication channel between speak-
er/writer and addressee. The chapter also details resource problems from the
point of view of standardization requirements, from names for languages to in-
tellectual property rights (IPR). Typical technical communication systems
are listed, as well as the kinds of data required for their development and intel-
lectual resources such as notations and transcription systems and storage
formats. Two areas are selected for detailed exemplification: resources for lexi-
con development and resources for developing spoken language systems and
multimodal systems.
Part I is concluded by Chapter 8 (“Evaluation of Technical Communi-
cation”) by Peter Menke. It provides an overview of related topics and methods
with a focus on technical communication. In this way, Chapter 8 can be read as a
complement to any of the handbook’s chapters (in any of the areas distinguished
by Figure 1) since evaluation is indispensable whenever it comes to assessing
the quality of technical enhancements of communication. Starting from a notion
of communication that distinguishes agents, medium and content as reference
points of its technical enhancement, this chapter provides a typology of differ-
ent objects of evaluation in technical communication. Further, with the help of
model theory, the chapter describes evaluation as a measurement operation
based on which notions (like objectivity, reliability and validity) can be ex-
plained (for more details on these topics from the point of view of linguistics see
Altmann and Grotjahn, 1988; Altmann, 1993). This is the background of the
third part of the chapter, where qualitative and quantitative methods of evalu-
ation are described. On the one hand, this includes questionnaires, interviews
and expert reviews, and on the other hand, statistical measures. Special empha-
sis is given to measures of effectiveness as used in automatic classification (cf.
Chapter 5). The chapter concludes with classification scenarios showing that
more often than not evaluation is rather an ongoing process than a point
measurement. Since the transparency and acceptability of technically enhanced
communication become more and more important not least with the advent of
decentralized social networks (cf. Chapter 14), evaluation will have a strong im-
pact on future developments in any of the areas dealt with in this handbook.

2.2. Part II: technical communication management
Serge Sharoff and Anthony Hartley address in Chapter 9 (“Lexicography, ter-
minology and ontologies”) the creation and representation of lexical structures
based upon a semasiological (concept to term) principle. Starting with the basic
concepts issued from the semiotic domain and the early work of E. Wüster, they
provide an overview of a) the characteristics of semiological structures seen as
ontological systems and b) of the various technological answers to the represen-
tation of such data, in particular within ISO committee TC 37 (with TMF and
TBX). In the last section of the chapter, the authors present the state of the art in
terminology extraction from text and show the importance of corpora as a basis
for the construction of termbanks.
The issue of multilingualism (i.e., multicodality in terms of Figure 1) in
scientific communication is presented in Chapter 10 (“Multilingual Comput-
ing”), where Felix Sasaki and Arle Lommel cover the various technologies, to-
gether with the corresponding international standards that have accompanied
the development of multilingual computing over the years. From character en-
coding (ISO 10646 and Unicode) to the various methods of representing multi-
lingual information and segments (terminologies with ISO 16642 and TBX,
translation memories with TMX, localization documents with XLIFF), the
authors clarify how these methods compare with the actual processes that are
required when dealing with multilingual content.
Chapter 11 by Laurent Romary (“Scholarly Communication”) tackles the
role of scholarly publication in the research process and looks at the conse-
quences of new information technologies in the organization of the scholarly
communication ecology. Covering issues related to document acquisition and
open access models, the chapter broadens to include research data, and ends up
by presenting a possible scenario for future scientific communication based on
virtual research environments. In this sense, the chapter addresses both the so-
cial complexity of collaborative scientific communication and the dissemi-
nation and retrieval of multimedia scientific data.
Central issues for technical communication systems concern the issues of
fitness for purpose, including reliability, risk assessment and safety in deploy-
ment environments. In Chapter 12 (“Verbal Communication Protocols in
Safety-Critical System Operations”), Peter Ladkin treats the specific domain
of verbal communication protocols in this context, with particular reference to
communication involving decisions taken before airline crashes, and to train
control protocols. For each of these domains case studies are provided. In the
aircraft domain, communication preceding an aircraft collision (the 2002 Überl-
ingen mid-air collision), involving conflicting decision criteria from humans
and technical systems and a case where technical information was interpreted
incorrectly by the crew (Cali) are discussed in detail. In the train domain, the

logic of two-way train operation on single lines and the consequences of failure
to follow this (Warngau) are analyzed. Solution strategies for handling these
communication issues are discussed in terms of formal grammars for protocol
implementation. Safety-critical situations as considered in Chapter 12 are ex-
tremely important also from the point of view of multimodal communication –
this topic bridges to the next chapter.
In Chapter 13 (“Multimodal Communication”), the topic of multimodal
communication is addressed from a linguistic point of view by Jens Allwood
and Elisabeth Ahlsén, starting with a clarification of the production, reception
and function of multimodal signs in interactive contexts. Differences between
human-human and human-machine communication are discussed in terms of
the relative flexibility of human adaptation and the relative inflexibility of ma-
chine adaptation, cultural variation and the complex multiple channels of
human communication, including gesture, posture, gaze and facial expressions.
Communication control and monitoring issues such as turn management are
outlined, and examples of machines involved in multimodal man-machine com-
munication are given, ranging from computers and smartphones to robot inter-
action and tutoring systems. Finally, the ethical issue of apparent naturalness in
machine communication systems leading to over-confidence in the abilities of
the system, and responsibility for consequences of actions of the system are em-
phasized.
In Chapter 14 (“Decentralized Online Social Networks”), Nils Diewald
deals with Social Network Sites (SNS) as one of the most recent developments
of online technical communication with a great influence on social inclusion
and exclusion. SNSs provide a technology to build Online Social Networks
(OSN). These are social networks that are spanned among agents according to
their communication relations as manifested by the underlying SNS. In this
sense, we may speak of a social community as an OSN that is basically net-
worked by means of the communication acts of its members as performed, for
example, with the help of an SNS such as Facebook. From this point of view,
Chapter 14 focuses on the social complexity of (quasi-synchronous or even
asynchronous) technical communication that may include cases as simple as 1:1
communication up to the level of situations in which many members of the same
community react upon the tweets or posts of many other members of the same
community. However, since this sort of communication happens online, aspects
of multimediality are also at the core of this chapter. The chapter is divided into
three parts. It starts with discussing sociological aspects of SNSs and OSNs.
This mainly includes quantitative models based on social network analysis
(Wasserman and Faust, 1999; Newman, 2010). Note that this section also in-
cludes a discussion of commercial aspects of SNSs. The second section is de-
voted to the architecture of SNSs and its impact on issues of (de-)centralization,
participation, privacy and legacy of communication via SNSs. The chapter con-

tinues with a description of technologies that underly SNSs mainly in terms of
protocols and formats used to technically manifest online communication via
SNSs. A last section is devoted to recent projects on SNSs that certainly will at-
tract more and more attention with the rise of SNSs and OSNs as scientific ob-
jects of communication theory.
With Chapter 15 (“Digital curation as communication mediation”),
Christopher A. Lee introduces the specific aspect of the management of digital
content from the point of view of maintenance and preservation. Digital cur-
ation, seen as the selection, representation and storing of digital traces, is con-
templated here from both communicative and technical activity. On the basis of
the OSI (ISO 1994) model, the author covers the various levels of represen-
tation that have to be considered in digital curation, ranging from bit stream pro-
cesses up to complex clusters of digital objects. Interestingly, digital curation
addresses the preservation of ultimately any aspect of the complexity of techni-
cal communication as distinguished by Figure 1. Therefore, it can be seen as an
outstanding research area of technical communication.7
2.3. Part III: communication by means of technology
Part III starts with Chapter 16 (“Internet-based Communication”) by Ulli
Waltinger and Alexa Breuing. It does so with an emphasis on semantic web
standards and technologies (e.g., RDF, OWL) and the Web 2.0. This also relates
to the notion of crowdsourcing (according to which efforts in data annotation
and semantic tagging are delegated to web communities) that may include the
integration of automatic and human computation (e.g., in the framework of
games with a purpose (Ahn, 2008)). An example of crowdsourcing is collabor-
ative writing as not only exemplified by Wikipedia (Leuf and Cunningham,
2001; Stegbauer, 2009) but also by numerous wikis that serve, for example,
scientific communication, leisure communication or enterprize communication.
Starting from an overview of the proliferation of technologies of web-based
communication (including, amongst others, e-mail-based communication, in-
stant messaging, and voice over IP), the chapter discusses several challenges
of this field of research. This includes the notion of the web of data (cf. the
linked data paradigm (Chiarcos, Nordhoff, and Hellmann, 2012)) as well as
models of social and emergent semantics (Steels and Hanappe, 2006; Gabrilo-
vich and Markovitch, 2009; Egozi, Markovitch, and Gabrilovich, 2011). In this
sense, Chapter 16 can be read as an overview of the development of social com-
plexity in web-based communication starting from mass communication
(where users tend to be passive recipients of static web content), and advancing
now to the area of true n:m-communication as exemplified by collaborative
writing and microblogging (where users perform both roles as authors and re-
cipients).

Chapter 17 (“Tutoring Systems and Computer-Assisted Language
Learning (CALL)”) by Henning Lobin and Dietmar Rösler deals with apply-
ing technical communication as a means to assist and enhance processes of
learning. It starts with enumerating aspects under which language learning (as a
special sort of communication between teacher and students) is altered due to
the use of assistive computer-based systems. From the point of view of Figure 1,
this mainly relates to the (multi-)mediality and (multi-)modality of communi-
cation processes. The chapter also bridges to the social complexity of communi-
cation as computer-assisted learning aims at autonomous learners who com-
municate not only more effectively with their teachers but also with each other.
This is exemplified by peer-assisted learning, cooperative learning and learning
in tandem that all are enhanced by technical means. The chapter provides an
overview of the development of this field of research as well as a thorough
exemplification in terms of computer-assisted language learning. The second
part of the chapter is devoted to data driven learning and teaching thereby bridg-
ing to corpus-based approaches. It concludes with an overview of intelligent
systems of CALL that integrate this area of application with intelligent systems
as studied and built in computer science.
The topic of multimodal technical communication recurs in Chapter 18
(“Framing Multimodal Technical Communication”), in which Andy Lück-
ing and Thies Pfeiffer concentrate on complexity issues in communication with
speech and gesture, and the problem of integrating information from these two
channels. Different forms of non-verbal behaviour are addressed in detail and
the development of studies in this field is surveyed. The theoretical semiotic
background is addressed in terms of sign types such as icon, index and symbol,
and the interaction of modalities with media is discussed. A detailed overview
of applications of technical communication is given, focussing specifically on
devices for communicating gestural movement, such as eye-trackers and track-
ing gloves. Finally, issues of integration or fusion of multimodal data from dif-
ferent channels, as well as the fission or splitting of communication channels are
discussed from technical and logical points of view.
Barrier-free communication is a field which has been seen as a small niche
mainly for the sight and hearing impaired and those with serious illnesses and
injuries, but in recent years the field has entered the mainstream of technical
communication with human-machine interfaces. Petra Kubina and Andy Lück-
ing discuss the state of the art in this area in Chapter 19 (“Barrier-free Com-
munication”), pointing out areas such as the personal element of barriers to
communication, with technical solutions for augmentative and alternative com-
munication as well as social barriers to communication. Contexts for barrier-
free communication such as the World-Wide Web are characterized in terms of
perceivability, operability, understandability and robustness, and markup sys-
tems for structuring barrier-free communication data in the conventional web,

the semantic web and the social web are discussed, including special issues like
PDF readers. Finally a wide range of research directions, applications and tools
are discussed, including examples such as the handheld Simputer developed in
Bangalore for pre-literate communities, with icon input and speech synthesis
output. Special techniques are also outlined. This includes tools for sonification
and haptic input, through the treatment of sign languages to cochlear implants.
Recent developments in multimodal technical communication are treated by
Stefan Kopp and Ipke Wachsmuth in Chapter 20 (“Artificial Interactivity”).
Constraints on communication with embodied agents and avatars, also related
to issues featured in Chapter 13 such as turn handling, timing and feedback are
discussed in the context of interaction with a virtual human performing a con-
struction task with instruction from a human interlocutor. The different levels of
processing and integration of forms and meanings in multimodal behavior are
discussed, and the specific issue of generating multimodal behavior is handled
in detail, with special reference to the architecture of behavior production, from
sensory data through feature extraction, segmentation and pattern recognition to
interpretation of the behavior and its integration into existing knowledge repre-
sentations.
Chapter 21 (“Ubiquitous Computing”) by Codrina Lauth, Bettina Be-
rendt, Bastian Pfleging & Albrecht Schmidt extends the book’s perspective on
multimedial and multimodal technical communication. It deals with one of the
most recent developments in this field of research that relates to the pervasive-
ness of computing in physically situated areas of human communication – that is,
not in the virtual world of web-based communication (cf. Chapter 16) or, more
specifically, social network sites (cf. Chapter 14). Instead, this chapter is about
technical communication in situations of everyday communication in which vis-
ual, acoustic, haptic or even olfactoric channels are in use as transmission media.
In principle, ubiquitous computing challenges the classical notion of human-
computer interaction in that sensors can make the body as a whole an interface in
technically enhanced everyday actions at any point in time at any location. This
opens technical communication to new areas of application that have been
widely closed for traditional approaches to text-based communication. With this
development, we may enthusiastically state that we are at the beginning of a new
area of technical communication (as explained and exemplified in this chapter)
that covers the whole branch of semiosis, that is, of human sign formation based
on whatever modality in whatever living conditions. In any event, any such as-
sessment has to keep track with the current stage of development of these tech-
nologies. Chapter 21 does exactly this: it provides a definition of ubiquitous
computing in conjunction with an overview of its current trends, exemplifi-
cations by means of short case studies as well as an overview of its underlying
technologies and future challenges. In this way, it can be read as an entry point to
one of the major developmental branches of technical communication.

The last chapter of Part III and also the last chapter of this handbook is
Chapter 22 (“P2P-based Communication”) by Gerhard Heyer, Florian Holz
& Sven Teresniak. It extends our series on future developments in technical
communication. On the one hand, the chapter focuses on one of the traditional
application areas of technical communication, that is, information retrieval
(Baeza-Yates and Ribeiro-Neto, 1999; Melucci, Baeza-Yates, and Croft, 2011).
However, it does so from the point of view of recent advancements in the theory
of complex networks (Steyvers and Tenenbaum, 2005). The basic idea of this
field of research is to profit from the peculiarities of social and semiotic net-
works in which neighbors tend to be linked according to similar or related in-
terests, meanings or functions. Using this model, information retrieval in P2P
networks means giving up the notion of a centralized retrieval engine in order to
rely instead on a network of semantically interlinked peers (software agents)
whose networking is optimized to serve the retrieval needs. From this point of
view, Chapter 22 mainly contributes to the social complexity of technically en-
hanced communication, however, it does so with a focus on monomodal written
communication. Chapter 22 closes the handbook’s thematic circle as it deals
with an area of application that, at the beginning of this handbook, is described
in terms of document authoring and representation.
Acknowledgment
We thank everyone who helped in realizing this handbook. First and foremost,
this includes our authors who spent a lot of their academic time supporting this
scientific endeavor. Our acknowledgement also includes the series editors as
well as Barbara Karlson who accompanied this project with great patience and
understanding.
Notes
1. See Lücking and Pfeiffer (2012) for a comprehensive consideration of these terms in
the context of the notion of multimodal communication.
2. See Gibbon (2012) for a notion of modality that starts from a notion of communication
as a pair of motor-sensory (output-input) organs, rather than separating production
and reception.
3. Here one may also think of so called intelligent documents (Lobin, 1999).
4. See Menke (2012) for a similar approach using a classical model of signal trans-
mission.
5. Ontologies concern the inference-driven processing of textual data and as such go
beyond purely distributional approaches. The area of human-machine interaction
based on artificial agents will profit especially from this research (Ferrucci, Brown,

Chu-Carroll, Fan, Gondek, Kalyanpur, Lally, Murdock, Nyberg, Prager, Schlaefer,
and Welty, 2010; Waltinger, Breuing, and Wachsmuth, 2011; Ovchinnikova, 2012).
6. Note that wikis currently evolve as a preferred information source of these approaches
(Gabrilovich and Markovitch, 2009) so that the social complexity of wiki-based com-
munication becomes an upcoming topic of text and web mining.
7. This is reflected, for example, by a recent Dagstuhl seminar on automation in digital
preservation (Chanod, Dobreva, Rauber, and Ross, 2010).
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I. Basic communication technologies
& infrastructures

1. Document Authoring: from Word Processing
to Text Generation
Aurélien Max
1. Introduction
This chapter discusses document authoring with the help of computers. Many
activities that are naturally carried out with computers are closely related to the
processes involved during different stages of text writing. So much that Barrett
(1991) argues that “there exists a natural affinity between writing and com-
puters, almost a genetic relationship. They are used as tools for representing
and discovering knowledge and as instruments for communication between
people”. As computers have imposed themselves for several decades now in
writing practices, studying the current state of the art in using computers for
producing text and the major evolutions that led to it may help better understand
how industrial initiatives and research efforts will take writers to the next gen-
eration of authoring practices.
We will first review the domain of computer-assisted authoring for free and
constrained text authoring, where the human writer takes the main role. We will
then discuss the other end of the spectrum with document generation and trans-
formation by computer, and visit intermediary areas. Future directions drawn
from research in Natural Language Processing will conclude the chapter.
2. Computer-assisted Authoring
This section is concerned with the implications and possibilities offered by
using computers for creating textual documents. We start by discussing the
main steps of a typical cycle of document creation, and review the main ways in
which computers can assist humans and discuss their impact on document cre-
ation and usage. This section then moves on to computer software that can be
used for supporting free authoring activities. We first consider the opposition
between rendered editing and declarative formatting. We then turn to the de-
scription of tools for structuring documents, tools for searching information
during writing, and tools for language analysis. The last part of this section con-
siders the domain of constrained text authoring, which is of significant import-
ance for technical communication. We first discuss the constraints that can be
put on language use with controlled languages, and then the constraints that can
be put on document content and structure.

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