This paper presents ArgRewrite, a corpus of between-draft revisions of argumentative essays. Drafts are manually aligned at the sentence level, and the writer’s purpose for each revision is annotated with categories analogous to those used in argument mining and discourse analysis. The corpus should enable advanced research in writing comparison and revision analysis, as demonstrated via our ow...

The following main ideas have been pointed out and put to work within our paper: (a) Information Structure (IS) theories (topic-focus, theme-rheme, background-contrast, informational and contrastive focus, focus projection rules, etc.) on text are shown to behave currently as a consistent linguistic tool that can stand behind a correct, language and contextual-depending, mapping of text into sp...

In this paper, we briefly present the objectives of Inference Anchoring Theory (IAT) and the formal structure which is proposed for dialogues. Then, we introduce our development corpus, and a computational model designed for the identification of discourse minimal units in the context of argumentation and the illocutionary force associated with each unit. We show the categories of resources whi...

Knowledge systems development and use have been significantly encumbered by the difficulties of eliciting and formalizing the expertise upon which knowledge workers rely. This paper approaches the problem from an examination of the knowledge competencies of knowledge workers in order to define a universe of discourse for knowledge elicitation. It outlines two categories and several types of kno...

This paper presents a possible application of a text-dependent speaker recognition system within the unconstrained domain of telephone conversation speech, as contained in the Switchboard I corpus. The system utilizes word HMMs to generate likelihood scores for key words among the backchannel, filled pause, and discourse marker categories. Results on tests using a variant of the NIST 2001 exten...

In this paper we report a behavioural experiment documenting that different lexicosyntactic formulations of the discourse relation of causation are deemed more or less acceptable by different categories of readers. We further report promising results for automatically selecting the formulation that is most appropriate for a given category of reader using supervised learning. This investigation ...

Contrary to speech interpretation by humans in which the same discourse may be interpreted differently by different subjects, for practical applications of computer understanding the result of interpretation should be unique for a given signal. Usually it is represented by an object which is an instance of class corresponding to a semantic structure which can be fairly complex even if it is bui...

Approaches to discourse understanding fall roughly into two categories: those that treat mental states as elemental and thus reason directly about them, and those that do not reason about the beliefs and intentions of agents themselves, but about the propositions and actions that might be considered objects of those beliefs and intentions. The rst type of approach is a mental phenomenon approac...

This article deals with some adverbs and adverbial constructions expressing epistemic modality in Italian. These forms are commonly considered as fully lexical. It will be shown, though, that they can be compared to grammatical forms, at least to an extent. In fact, on the one hand they are organized in a closed lexical paradigm characterized by semantic complementarity and seemingly eas y to b...