We study dependencies between discourse structure and speech recognition problems (SRP) in a corpus of speech-based computer tutoring dialogues. This analysis can inform us whether there are places in the discourse structure prone to more SRP. We automatically extract the discourse structure by taking advantage of how the tutoring information is encoded in our system. To quantify the discourse ...

The lack of open discourse corpus for Chinese brings limitations for many natural language processing tasks. In this work, we present the first open discourse treebank for Chinese, namely, the Discourse Treebank for Chinese (DTBC). At the current stage, we annotated explicit intra-sentence discourse connectives, their corresponding arguments and senses for all 890 documents of the Chinese Treeb...

Humans process language word by word and construct partial linguistic structures on the fly before the end of the sentence is perceived. Inspired by this cognitive ability, incremental algorithms for natural language processing tasks have been proposed and demonstrated promising performance. For discourse relation (DR) parsing, however, it is not yet clear to what extent humans can recognize DR...

This study was an attempt to investigate Iranian and Spanish intermediate nonnative English learners’ request strategies to their faculty. To this aim, 74 (50 Iranian and 24 Spanish) nonnative English intermediate learners participated in this study. A discourse completion test (DCT) was used to elicit the request strategies used by the participants. The findings suggested the participants empl...

Evaluating the quality of language output tasks such as Machine Translation (MT) and Automatic Summarisation (AS) is a challenging topic in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Recently, techniques focusing only on the use of outputs of the systems and source information have been investigated. In MT, this is referred to as Quality Estimation (QE), an approach that uses machine learning technique...