Studies of the relationship between prosody and the topic structure of longer discourses have tended to focus on intonational cues, most specifically fundamental frequency (F0). However, this may limit the kinds of topic structure it is possible to identify. A case study of two speakers shows that including speech rate along with F0 factors in an analysis of the prosody of topic structure can b...

Studies of the relationship between prosody and the topic structure of longer discourses have tended to focus on intonational cues, most specifically fundamental frequency (F0). However, this may limit the kinds of topic structure it is possible to identify. A case study of two speakers shows that including speech rate along with F0 factors in an analysis of the prosody of topic structure can b...

The task of implicit discourse relation classification has received increased attention in recent years, including two CoNNL shared tasks on the topic. Existing machine learning models for the task train on sections 2-21 of the PDTB and test on section 23, which includes a total of 761 implicit discourse relations. In this paper, we’d like to make a methodological point, arguing that the standa...

Information structure has been assumed to be an autonomous part of grammar for more than 100 years. It is represented as a partition of the sentence into two units, e.g., focus background, topic comment, focus topic, focus presupposition etc.1 Even though information structure is sometimes understood as textual or discourse structure, its organizational level is still defined with respect to th...

We describe a generic set of tools for representing, annotating, and analysing multi-party discourse, including: an ontology of multimodal discourse, a programming interface for that ontology, and NOMOS – a flexible and extensible toolkit for browsing and annotating discourse. We describe applications built using the NOMOS framework to facilitate a real annotation task, as well as for visualisi...

We present in this paper, the application of a novel approach to computational modeling, understanding and detection of social phenomena in online multi-party discourse. A two-tiered approach was developed to detect a collection of social phenomena deployed by participants, such as topic control, task control, disagreement and involvement. We discuss how the mid-level social phenomena can be re...

We present in this paper, the application of a novel approach to computational modeling, understanding and detection of social phenomena in online multi-party discourse. A two-tiered approach was developed to detect a collection of social phenomena deployed by participants, such as topic control, task control, disagreement and involvement. We discuss how the mid-level social phenomena can be re...

In French, the prosody associated with post-focus sequences is usually described a steadily flat, the suppression of any tonal variation being explained by the semantic and pragmatic content of these sequences. This paper aims to show that postfocus sequences may be realized in different ways. An experimental analysis of various post-focus sequences has shown that three distinct prosodic realiz...