This paper introduces an approach to generate video clips starting from an annotated commentary. The novelty of the approach lies in the use of rhetorical structure of the accompanying audio commentary in planning the video. The basic notions of cinematography are briefly introduced together with the Rhetorical Relation Theory to model the structure of a discourse. Then, the architecture of a v...

This study investigates the prosody of rhetorical questions in German. In an interaction study we examined how speakers use boundary tones, pitch, duration and voice quality to mark syntactically ambiguous questions as rhetorical or information seeking. To this end, speakers produced identical interrogatives (polar and wh questions) in rhetorical and information seeking contexts. The results sh...

This paper discusses a fundamental problem in natural language generation: how to organize the content of a text in a coherent and natural way. In this research, we set out to determine the semantic content and the rhetorical structure of texts and to develop heuristics to perform this process automatically within a text generation framework. The study was performed on a specific language and t...

The oral case presentation is an important communicative activity in the teaching and assessment of students. Despite its importance, not much attention has been paid to providing support for teachers to teach this difficult task to medical students who are novices to this form of communication. As a formalized piece of talk that takes a regularized form and used for a specific communicative go...

Parallelism is an important rhetorical device. We propose a machine learning approach for automated sentence parallelism identification in student essays. We build an essay dataset with sentence level parallelism annotated. We derive features by combining generalized word alignment strategies and the alignment measures between word sequences. The experimental results show that sentence parallel...

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.

This work aims to explore the correlation between the discourse structure of a spoken monologue and its prosody by predicting discourse relations from different prosodic attributes. For this purpose, a corpus of semi-spontaneous monologues in English has been automatically annotated according to the Rhetorical Structure Theory, which models coherence in text via rhetorical relations. From corre...

Overloaded and disinterested consumers have become skillful at screening out ads. In response, advertisers employ and combine various strategies, with two major ones being (a) rhetorical figures (e.g., rhyme, puns) and (b) message repetition. Though each has received substantial research attention and is crucial to advertising theory, they have not been examined simultaneously. We conducted a m...

  Translation of the Holy Quran can be difficult for translators in terms of accuracy and translatability. Sometimes translators fail to render the Quranic thoughts because of the lack of language features in target languages. This results in an unfavorable interpretation. One of the challenging aspects of translating Quran is reference switching as rhetorical devices, which are widespread i...

I use the distinction between the nuclei and the satellites that pertain to discourse relations to introduce a compositionality criterion for discourse trees. I provide a first-order formalization of rhetorical structure trees and, on its basis, I derive an algorithm that constructs all the valid rhetorical trees that can be associated with a given discourse.