This paper presents an approach towards the definition of a formal framework for rhetorical argumentation. Before describing the competence theory behind the framework, we introduce the notion of rhetorical argument, and describe the New Rhetoric, a well known theory in the philosophy of argumentation, upon which our work is based.

We show that discourse structure, as defined by Rhetorical Structure Theory and provided by an existing discourse parser, benefits text categorization. Our approach uses a recursive neural network and a newly proposed attention mechanism to compute a representation of the text that focuses on salient content, from the perspective of both RST and the task. Experiments consider variants of the ap...

We present in this paper the development process and the evaluation procedure of a Brazilian Portuguese discourse parser called DiZer. Based on Rhetorical Structure Theory, DiZer is a symbolic cue phrase-based analyzer that makes use of discourse templates learned from a corpus of scientific texts to identify and build the discourse structure of texts. DiZer evaluation shows satisfactory result...

This paper presents the review and evaluation of DiZer – an automatic discourse analyzer for Brazilian Portuguese. Based on Rhetorical Structure Theory, DiZer is a symbolic analyzer that makes use of linguistic patterns learned from a corpus of scientific texts to identify and build the discourse structure of texts. DiZer evaluation shows satisfactory results for scientific texts. In order to t...

Abstract Although flourishing research has been devoted to research on article abstracts, more studies are needed to unpack the relationship between rhetorical moves and their associated linguistic and rhetorical features (e.g., metadiscourse). To underpin this relationship, the current study analyzed a total of 60 research article abstracts written in English by two cultural groups in three di...

SciPo is a system whose ultimate goal is to support novice writers in producing academic texts in Brazilian Portuguese through presentation of critiques and suggestions. Currently, it focuses on the rhetorical structure of texts, being capable of automatically detecting and criticizing the rhetorical structure of Abstract sections. We describe a system that enhances SciPo’s functionality by eva...

The organization of discourse is multifaceted. Theories that take a single perspective on discourse structure, examining for example only goal satisfaction or textual coherence or ignoring the context in which a text was generated, will fail to identify the full functional significance of the content and organization of text. The task of generating coherent text to meet some communicative inten...

Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) (Mann and Thompson 1987), argues that in most coherent discourse, consecutive discourse elements are related by a small set of rhetorical relations. Moreover, RST suggests that the information conveyed in a discourse over and above what is conveyed in its component clauses can be der ived from the rhetorical relation-based structure of the discourse. A large nu...

Rhetorical biset functors can be defined for any family of finite groups that is closed under subquotients up to isomorphism. The rhetorical p-biset functors almost coincide with the rational p-biset functors. We show that, over a field with characteristic zero, the rhetorical biset functors are semisimple and, furthermore, they admit a character theory involving primitive characters of automor...