Based on research done on a small corpus of comment articles, this paper reconsiders the relation between topic entity, subject function and given status and explores their role in the construction and maintenance of the global discourse topic. It claims that even though it is pertinent to say that at sentence level much of the topical information is non-subject and/or frequently postverbal wit...

Objective The goal of this study was to investigate whether on-topic visual cues can serve as aids for the maintenance of discourse coherence and informativeness in autobiographical narratives of persons with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Methods The experiment consisted of three randomized conversation conditions: one without prompts, showing a blank computer screen; an on-topic condition, showi...

We present a method for unsupervised topic modelling which adapts methods used in document classification (Blei et al., 2003; Griffiths and Steyvers, 2004) to unsegmented multi-party discourse transcripts. We show how Bayesian inference in this generative model can be used to simultaneously address the problems of topic segmentation and topic identification: automatically segmenting multi-party...

We present a method for unsupervised topic modelling which adapts methods used in document classification (Blei et al., 2003; Griffiths and Steyvers, 2004) to unsegmented multi-party discourse transcripts. We show how Bayesian inference in this generative model can be used to simultaneously address the problems of topic segmentation and topic identification; automatically segmenting multiparty ...

The dynamics of social interactions during human-human conversation have attracted the attention of many researchers aiming at improving the naturalness of automatic dialogue systems and creating socially aware machines. While many studies have investigate social dynamics in relation to the emotional sphere of a conversation, in this work we investigate whether these dynamics are correlated wit...

In this article we are concerned with identifying topics of utterances in texts, which are discourse elements reflecting the links between a sentence and its context. The information carried by the topics can be used to contribute to a number of natural language processing applications, such as information retrieval, text categorization and discourse segmentation etc. However, the phenomenon of...

This paper attempts to provide a sketch of formalism for Contrastive Topic in Korean and English. Based on the idea that a discourse structure basically consists of question/answer pairs, the proposed formalism shows 1) Korean contrastive topic corresponds to a certain prosody in English and the information structure for contrastive topic in both languages is essentially same, 2) Contrastive to...

Weibo messages sentiment polarity classification towards given topics refers to that the machine automatically classifies whether the weibo message is of positive, negative, or neutral sentiment towards the given topic. The algorithm the sentiment analysis system CUCsas adopts to perform this task includes three steps: (1) whether there is an “exp” (short for “expression having evaluation meani...

Abductive reasoning is used in a bidirectional framework for syntactic realization and semantic interpretation. The use of the framework is illustrated in a case study of sentence generation, where different syntactic forms are generated depending on the status of discourse information. Examples are given involving three different syntactic constructions in German root clauses. 1 Pragmatics in ...

The following main ideas have been pointed out and put to work within our paper: (a) Information Structure (IS) theories (topic-focus, theme-rheme, background-contrast, informational and contrastive focus, focus projection rules, etc.) on text are shown to behave currently as a consistent linguistic tool that can stand behind a correct, language and contextual-depending, mapping of text into sp...