The present manuscript focuses on my research activity which is centred on the study and the representation of cognitive processes used when authors write documents. A main objective in this work was to develop environments for editing various types of documents. Two types of process were the subject of the undertaken research: intentions of communication and argumentation. Speech acts theory from of Austin and Searles works is used as a theoretical background of this research. We developed two models within the framework of industrial and academic projects: (1) The model ACE (Acts of the Written Communication) in which we distinguish between the action made on the document (meta-act) and the action towards the reader (domain-act) and; (2) The model of the Intentional Structures which makes it possible to represent the intentions of the authors. From the applicability point of view, we were interested particularly in: · Technical documentation (such as the operational documentation about flight on an aircraft); · Pedagogical documents (course supports); · Documents to keep traces of decision at time of design of an artefact, called Design Rationale; and more recently with · Legal documents (contracts). Explicit intentions are inserted as a set of metadata in the documents which makes it possible to access to these documents in terms of words related to the semantics of intentions. Explicit intentions allow authors to better reflecting on their communication strategy and to improve the legibility of the documents. Explicit intentions permit authors to check if they are faithful and coherent with their own objectives. The representation of knowledge with metadata by using an annotation system based on Xml makes it possible to browse the documents in terms of authors intentions. The representation of the argumentative structures uses the concept of persuasive strength of the arguments. The MARINE model (Model of Argumentation à INtervalle s d' Evaluation) allows to associate weights on the components of an argument in order to take account of various criteria which depend on both the audience and the situation of communication. Marine is used as a conceptual model in a prototype, of argumentative construction which enables an author to choose in an interactive way the best strategy of communication. The algorithm calculates the best arguments not only of what it is possible to say but especially according to possible conflicts that the interlocutor may emit. null null
