In this paper we investigate how discourse structure a ects the meanings of words and how the meanings of words a ect discourse structure We integrate three ingredients a theory of discourse structure called sdrt which represents discourse in terms of rhetorical relations that glue together the propositions introduced by the text segments an accom panying theory of discourse attachment called d...

A natural and intuitive principle concerning the organization of content in discourse is that discourse structure and rhetorical function operate at several levels of granularity at once. There are low level discourse connections between elementary discourse units (EDUs), even within a single sentence; but there are also discourse connections between larger constituents, complex discourse units...

Discourse markers, also known as clue words, are used extensively in human-human task-oriented dialogs to signal the structure of the discourse. Previous work showed their importance in monologs and social conversations for marking discourse structure , but little attention has been paid to their importance in spoken dialog systems. This paper investigates what discourse markers signal about th...

The annotations of the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) include (1) discourse connectives and their arguments, and (2) attribution of each argument of each connective and of the relation it denotes. Because the PDTB covers the same text as the Penn TreeBank WSJ corpus, syntactic and discourse annotation can be compared. This has revealed significant differences between syntactic structure and dis...

*Correspondence: [email protected] 2School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University, ShiZi Road, Suzhou, China Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Abstract Background: How to build a suitable discourse topic structure is an important issue in discourse topic analysis, which is the core of natural language understanding. Not only is it the key ba...

In this paper, the authors propose a query focussed summary generation system which is constructed on top of a unique language-independent discourse structure. The discourse structure is comprised of three text representation techniques, namely, Universal Networking Language (UNL), Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and saṅgatis. The discourse structure is indexed based on a concept called sūtra...

It is widely accepted that discourses are composed of segments and that the recognition of segment boundaries is essential to a determination of discourse meaning (Grosz and Sidner, 1986). Written language has orthographic cues such as section headings, paragraph boundaries, and punctuation which can assist in identifying discourse structure. In spoken language, into-national variation provides...

Discourse markers are words or phrases that speakers use at the beginning of a contribution to signal how it relates to prior discourse. They mark changes in the global discourse structure by e.g. signalling the beginning of a new topic or the return to a previous topic. However, words that are used as discourse markers often also have a sentential function. If discourse markers are to be used ...

Representing a document as a bag-of-words and using keywords to retrieve relevant documents have seen a great success in large scale information retrieval systems such as Web search engines. Bag-of-words representation is computationally efficient and with proper term weighting and document ranking methods can perform surprisingly well for a simple document representation method. However, such ...