Focalizers and Discourse Relations

Discourse Relations Versus Discourse Marker Relations

While it seems intuitively obvious tha t many discourse markers (DMs) are able to express discourse relat ions (DRs) which ex i s t independently, the specific contr ibut ion of DMs if any is not clear. In this paper , we investigate the s tatus of some consequence DMs in French. We observe tha t it is difficult to cons t ruc t a clear and simple definition based on DRs for these DMs. Next , we...

Discourse Relations, Discourse Structure, Discourse Semantics

It is generally accepted that a discourse connective expresses a semantic and/or pragmatic relation between its matrix sentence or clause and something in the previous discourse. Usually the sense of this relation is expressed as a label, often within a hierarchy of sense labels. But the meaning of these labels may vary from system to system, and the same connective may be assigned different la...

On Discourse Relations, Rhetorical Relations And Rhetoric

Discourses are the collaborative activities of (human) agents who have purposes for communicating. Discourse structure includes the purposes of those agents, which I take, following [GroszSid86], to be formally expressible as intentions and beliefs. While the theory of discourse structures has influenced how many computational linguists think about discourse processing, it does not preclude car...

Automated Discourse Generation Using Discourse Structure Relations

This paper summarizes work over the past ve years on the automated planning and generation of multisentence texts using discourse structure relations, placing it in context of ongoing eeorts by Computational Linguists and Linguists to understand the structure of discourse. Based on a series of studies by the author and others, the paper describes how the orientation of generation toward communi...

Explicit Discourse Connectives / Implicit Discourse Relations