We introduce a model of coherence which captures the intentional discourse structure in text. Our work is based on the hypothesis that syntax provides a proxy for the communicative goal of a sentence and therefore the sequence of sentences in a coherent discourse should exhibit detectable structural patterns. Results show that our method has high discriminating power for separating out coherent...

Event Processing is an emerging area in the IT industry, evident by the burst of products, and attention given by analysts, venture capitals and enterprises. One of the notable characteristics of event processing is its close relation to temporal aspects. One can view event processing as getting a decision that is based on looking at the history of transitions in the domain of discourse. This g...

This paper selects from a longer chapter which recapitulates and extends discussions on anti administration (anti-admin) from the perspective of discourse theory. First, it discusses discourse theory, explaining that the discourses of anti-admin aim toward the inclusion of marginalized or excluded perspectives. Second, it outlines some anti-admin theory. Parallel to the action of anti matter an...

This tiiesis addresses a difficult problem in text processing: crealing a System lo automalically dérive rhetorical structures o f text. Allhough thè rhelorical structure lias proven to be useful in many fields o f text processing sucli as text summarisation and information extraction, Systems that auiomalically generate rhetorical structures with high accuracy are difficult to find. This is bc...

This contribution explores the subgroup of text structuring expressions with the form preposition + demonstrative pronoun, thus it is devoted to an aspect of the interaction of coreference relations and relations signaled by discourse connectives (DCs) in a text. The demonstrative pronoun typically signals a referential link to an antecedent, whereas the whole expression can, but does not have ...

Necessitism is the view that necessarily everything is necessarily something; contingentism is the negation of necessitism. The dispute between them is reminiscent of, but clearer than, the more familiar one between possibilism and actualism. A mapping often used to ‘translate’ actualist discourse into possibilist discourse is adapted to map every sentence of a first-order modal language to a s...

This paper presents some preliminary data from a study which investigates the intonation patterns of Malay speakers of English (MSEs). The study examines the MSEs’ intonation using Brazil’s [4] Discourse Intonation (DI) approach as the main method of analysis, with a view to modifying DI for this variety in view of how meaning is conveyed and understood. The spoken discourse of MSEs collected u...

In Chinese text, discourse connectives constitute a major linguistic device available for a writer to explicitly indicate the structure of a discourse. This set of discourse connectives, consisting of a few hundred entries in modern Chinese, is relatively stable and domain independent. In a recently published paper [T'sou 1996], a computational procedure was introduced to generate the abstract ...

The paper tries to contribute to the general discussion on discourse connectives, concretely to the question whether it is meaningful to distinguish two separate groups of connectives – i.e. “classical” connectives limited to few predefined classes like conjunctions or adverbs (e.g. but) vs. alternative lexicalizations of connectives (i.e. unrestricted expressions and phrases like the reason is...

An account is ooered of the sense of referring expressions in in-tensional contexts. Unlike Russell's classic account in terms of the de re/de dicto distinction, this doesn't rely on a quantiier scope ambiguity in the logical form. Instead, diierent senses of a referring expression are captured by the diierent discourse models which emerge in diier-ent contexts of use. This approach has two adv...