Various NLP applications require automatic discourse analysis of texts. For analysis of scientific and technical texts, we propose to use all typical lexical units organizing scientific discourse; we call them common scientific words and expressions, most of them are known as discourse markers. The paper discusses features of scientific discourse, as well as the variety of discourse markers spe...

Nick Asher: (Invited): Constraints in Discourse: Part of a more general theory of rationality? SDRT promotes two central ideas relevant to constraints in discourse: (1) dynamic semantic update is constrained by discourse structure; (2) discourse coherence is a scalar phenomenon and so discourse structure construction should proceed by maximizing discourse coherence given the resources available...

The lack of annotated corpora brings limitations in research of discourse classification for many languages. In this paper, we present the first effort towards recognizing ambiguities of discourse connectives, which is fundamental to discourse classification for resource-poor language such as Chinese. A language independent framework is proposed utilizing bilingual dictionaries, Penn Discourse ...

Discourse Understanding is hard. This seems to be especially true for mathematical discourse, that is proofs. Restricting discourse to mathematical discourse allow us, however, to study the subject matter in its purest form. This domain of discourse is rich and welldefined, highly structured, offers a well-defined set of discourse relations and forces/allows us to apply mathematical reasoning. ...

The corpora available for training discourse relation classifiers are annotated using a general set of discourse relations. However, for certain applications, custom discourse relations are required. Creating a new annotated corpus with a new relation taxonomy is a timeconsuming and costly process. We address this problem by proposing a semi-supervised approach to discourse relation classificat...

I In this paper we present algorithms for the interpretation and generation of a kind of particu-larized conversational implicature occurring in certain indirect replies. Our algorithms make use of discourse expectations, discourse plans, and discourse relations. The algorithms calculate implica-tures of discourse units of one or more sentences. Our approach has several advantages. First, by ta...

Previous work by Lin et al. (2011) demonstrated the effectiveness of using discourse relations for evaluating text coherence. However, their work was based on discourse relations annotated in accordance with the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) (Prasad et al., 2008), which encodes only very shallow discourse structures; therefore, they cannot capture long-distance discourse dependencies. In this ...

A spontaneously spoken, natural Japanese discourse contains many instances of the so-called redundant interjections and of back-channel utterances. These expressions have not hitherto received much attention and few systematic analyses have been made, since they were regarded as useless, spurious expressions. On the basis of the analysis of spoken dialogue corpus, we claim that these utterances...

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...