Speakers have been hypothesized to organize discourse content so as to achieve communicative efficiency. Previous work has focused on indirect tests of the hypothesis that speakers aim to keep per-word entropy constant across discourses to achieve communicative efficiency (Genzel & Charniak, 2002). We present novel and more direct evidence by examining the role of topic shift in discourse plann...

Philosophers of language have drawn on metamathematical results in varied ways. Extensionalist philosophers have been particularly impressed with two, not unrelated, facts: the existence, due to Frege/Tarski, of a certain sort of semantics, and the seeming absence of intensional contexts from mathematical discourse. The philosophical import of these facts is at best murky. Extensionalists will ...

We conducted a Health Impact Assessment (HIA) focused on water and sanitation in Vinton, TX, a small rural town on the U.S./Mexico Border. We present the Vinton HIA as a case study to inform the practice of HIA in rural limited resource communities with higher than average levels of unemployment and poverty, and limited infrastructure. Household surveys, focus groups, and interviews provided qu...

This paper presents empirical results comparing spoken and keyboard communication. It is shown that speakers a t tempt to achieve more detailed goals in giving instructions than do users of keyboards. One specific kind of f ine-grained communicative act, a request that the hearer identify the referent of a noun phrase, is shown to dominate spoken instruction-giving discourse, but is nearly abse...

Interrogative sentences are generally used to perform speech acts of directly asking a question or making a request, but they are also used to convey such speech acts indirectly. In the utterances, such indirect uses of interrogative sentences usually carry speaker’s emotion with a negative attitude, which is close to an expression of anger. The identification of such negative emotion is known ...

t has been two decades since the publication of Davidson’s twin papers, I “Truth and Meaning” (1967) and “On Saying That” (1968). The first proposed that a Tarskian truth theory for a language L can be (the heart of) a theory of meaning for L. The second proposed a radically novel approach, the paratactic account, to the logical form of indirect discourse. The two proposals are related in a num...

This paper describes the current state of the Turkish Discourse Bank, the first publicly available annotated discourse resource for Turkish. It describes the annotation methods and the challenges posed by annotating Turkish, a free word order language with rich morphology. It shows the usefulness of the PDTB style annotation but points out the need to expand this annotation style with the needs...

In recent years, more research has been devoted to studying the subtask of the complete shallow discourse parsing, such as indentifying discourse connective and arguments of connective. There is a need to design a full discourse parser to pull these subtasks together. So we develop a discourse parser turning the free text into discourse relations. The parser includes connective identifier, argu...

Based on empirical evidence from a free word order language (German) we propose a fundamental revision of the principles guiding the ordering of discourse entities in the forward-looking centers within the centering model. We claim that grammatical role criteria should be replaced by indicators of the functional information structure of the utterances, i.e., the distinction between context-boun...

Perceived prominence in Russian, a free word order language, can be communicated prosodically and/or via word order. Paired production and perception experiments with native speakers show that discourse-prominent constituents are marked acoustically and through a change in word order. These two route to prominence may reinforce each other, as evident from distinctively higher duration and inten...