Of more specific concern to computational mathetics are the more difficult issues of pragmatics and discourse, because we are concerned with the structure of lengthy interactions between systems and students and with the effect that such interactions may have on the participants' beliefs and goals.
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When this research relates to dialogue with computer systems, it has usually been with respect to a general user, but we will focus on students in this chapter. There is also a perennial debate about the extent to which thinking and learning are inherently related to dialogue. To the extent that such discussions agree that dialogue promotes learning they support our consideration of aspects of dialogue. Discourse analysis involves the partitioning of a sequence of sentences into segments each of which is locally coherent, in that each sentence in a segment is concerned with the same topic. Segments are considered to be hierarchically- organised so that they may be temporarily suspended during an interrupting subsegment.