We show that discourse structure need not bear the full burden of conveying discourse relations by showing that many of them can be explained nonstructurally in terms of the grounding of anaphoric presuppositions (Van der Sandt, 1992). This simplifies discourse structure, while still allowing the realisation of a full range of discourse relations. This is achieved using the same semantic machin...

The term `discourse' is used to describe the entangled and contested transactions through which real-world planning and policy issues are addressed. Studies of discourses have become an important way of understanding how power is mediated in planning, but the methods through which discourses are identified and evaluated is as yet unclear in the literature. Here, we describe our attemptöwith sti...

In computational theories of discourse, there are at least three processes presumed to operate under a limited attention constraint of some type: (1) ellipsis interpretation; (2) pronominal anaphora interpretation; and (3) inference of discourse relations between representations A and B of utterances in a discourse, e.g. B motivates A. In each case, the interpretation of the current element B o...

The overall sentiment of a text is critically affected by its discourse structure. By splitting a text into text spans with different discourse relations, we automatically train the weights of different relations in accordance with their importance, and then make use of discourse structure knowledge to improve sentiment classification. In this paper, we utilize explicit connectives to predict d...

Some recent studies in computat ional l inguist ics have aimed to take advantage of various cues presented by punctuation marks. This short survey is intended to summarise these research efforts and additionally, to outline a current perspect ive for the usage and functions of punctuation marks. We conclude by presenting an information-based f ramework for punctuation, influenced by treatments ...

Many theories of discourse structure rely on the idea that the segments comprising the discourse are linked through inferred relations such as causality and temporal contiguity. These theories suggest that the resulting discourse is represented hierarchically. Two experiments examine some of the implications of these hierarchical structures on the perceived coherence of texts. Experiment 1 show...

This study examined narrative discourse in 20 children and adolescents at least 1 year after sustaining a head injury. Narratives were analyzed along the dimensions of language structure, information structure, and flow of information. Severity of impaired consciousness was associated with a significant reduction in the amount of language and information. The most important finding which emerge...

An agent's ability to understand an utterance depends upon its ability to relate that utterance to the preceding discourse. The agent must determine whether the utterance begins a new segment of the discourse, completes the current segment, or contributes to it. The intentional structure of the discourse, comprised of discourse segment purposes and their interrelationships, plays a central role...

Various kinds of video recordings have discourse structures. Therefore, it is important to determine how video segments are combined and what kind of coherence relations they are connected with. In this paper, we propose a method for estimating the discourse structure of video news reports by analyzing the discourse structure of their transcripts.