Paragraph-by-paragraph machine translation seems to be for now, an unjustifiably complicated task for practical needs. It involves the complete understanding of the paragraph, the determination of discourse topic(s), goals, intentions, so that the output can be produced in accordance with the respective discourse rules and purposes. However, recognizing topic, goal, intention by a computer prog...

We present a new, data-driven approach to text planning, which can be used not only to map full knowledge pools into natural language texts, but also to generate texts that satisfy multiple, high-level communicative goals. The approach explains how global coherence can be achieved by exploiting the local coherence constraints of rhetorical relations. The local constraints were derived from a co...

In this article we present the RST Spanish Treebank, the first corpus annotated with rhetorical relations for this language. We describe the characteristics of the corpus, the annotation criteria, the annotation procedure, the inter-annotator agreement, and other related aspects. Moreover, we show the interface that we have developed to carry out searches over the corpus’ annotated texts.

In this paper we present an architecture for choosing a flexible response in a natural language system involved in information-seeking tasks. Our work considers the crucial issue of choosing what information to provide and how to structure it, considering from the generation perspective a model of dialogue that was previously developed to study the recognition activity of an agent. In such a mo...

This paper investigates whether the model of local rhetorical coherence suggested in Knott et al. (2001) can boost the performance of the Centering-based metrics of entity coherence employed by Karamanis et al. (2004) for the task of information ordering. Rhetorical coherence is integrated into the way Centering’s basic data structures are derived from the annotated features of the GNOME corpus...

This paper investigates factors that can be used in discourse analysis, specifically, cohesive devices. The paper shows that cohesive devices such as cue phrases can provide information about the linkages inside a text. We propose three types of cue phrases (the ordinary cue phrases, noun-phrase cues, and verb-phrase cues). An algorithm to compute rhetorical relations between two elementary dis...

Introduction Most current formal theories of discourse incorporate some insight concerning the contribution of aspect to discourse structure, and many draw upon Hans Kamp’s analysis of the aspectual contribution of tenses, as well as Vlach’s notion of tenses as aspect-shift operators (cf. Vlach 1981). Thus, Kamp & Rohrer (1983) argue that the French imparfait acts as a ‘stativizer’, mapping non...

based' approaches to discourse analysis and text generation suuer from a common problem: there is considerable disagreement between researchers over the set of relations which is proposed. Few researchers use identical sets of relations, and many use relations not found in any other sets. This proliferation of relations has been pointed out before (eg Hovy 1]), and several methods for justifyin...

A traditional approach to contrastive rhetoric has emphasized cultural difference in rhetorical patterns among various languages. Despite its laudable pedagogical intentions to raise teachers’ and students’ cultural and rhetorical awareness in second language writing, traditional contrastive rhetoric has perpetuated static binaries between English and other languages and viewed students as cult...