The Importance of Computational Discourse Analysis

Computational Discourse Analysis (CDA) has become an essential field of inquiry in response to the growing complexity and scale of textual data in contemporary societies. Traditional discourse analysis has offered rich qualitative insights into meaning, ideology, and social interaction, yet it faces methodological limitations when applied to large and heterogeneous corpora. This review article argues that computational discourse analysis provides a necessary extension to classical discourse studies by integrating cognitive theories of discourse comprehension, linguistically informed annotated resources, and large-scale computational methods. Drawing on three representative works—a theoretical account of discourse as resource-limited inferential processing, the construction of a discourse and coreference corpus for Persian, and a comparative computational analysis of public discourse on artificial intelligence—this article demonstrates how computational discourse analysis bridges theory, data, and social application. The review highlights the epistemological, methodological, and societal significance of CDA and outlines its implications for future research.

کلیدواژه ها:

computational discourse analysis ، artificial intelligence ، social interaction ، computational methods