This paper discusses an approach to planning the content of instructional texts. The research is based on a corpus study of 15 French procedural texts ranging from step--bystep device manuals to general artistic procedures. The approach taken starts from an AI task planner building a task representation, from which semantic carriers are selected. The most appropriate RST relations to communicat...

This essay conceptualizes and applies a theory of rhetorical debility to new materialist studies. Drawing from critical disability studies, frames the ways that hierarchical human nonhuman relations can inhibit certain rhetoricities while enabling others under neoliberalism. extends concept “rhetorical capacities,” located within genealogy posthuman thought in response intersectional critique m...

Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) has been in constant research for a number of years. The different parts of a text are called text spans. RST helps in organizing these text spans. These text spans are connected with each other by Discourse markers. In this paper, we are exploring the possibility of realizing some RST relations (CONTRAST, SEQUENCE and PARALLEL) from multi-nuclear sentences in ...

This study explores the potential of a theory of discourse coherence relations to distinguish between truth and deception. It uses Rhetorical Structure Theory and logistic regression to build a deception model that achieves 78% accuracy on a sample of goldstandard Amazon book reviews drawn from the Deceptive Review corpus. It finds Contrast discourse relations to be a significant predictor of v...

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...

Consensus is the desired result in many argumentative discourses such as negotiations, public debates, and goal-oriented forums. However, due to the fact that usually people are poor arguers, a support of argumentation is necessary. Web-2 provides means for the online discussions which have their characteristic features. In our paper we study the features of discourse which lead to agreement. W...

In this paper, we investigate which information is useful for the detection of rhetorical (RST) relations between (Multi-) Sentential Discourse Units ((M -)SDUs)-text spans consisting of one or more sentences-within the same paragraph. In order to do so, we simplified the task of discourse parsing to a decision problem in which we decided whether an (M-)SDU is either rhetorically related to a p...

Recent studies on extractive text summarization formulate it as a combinatorial optimization problem such as a Knapsack Problem, a Maximum Coverage Problem or a Budgeted Median Problem. These methods successfully improved summarization quality, but they did not consider the rhetorical relations between the textual units of a source document. Thus, summaries generated by these methods may lack l...

This paper is concenled with heuristics for segmenting narratives into units that form the basic elements of discourse representations and that constrain the application of focusing algorithms. The following classes of di~ontinuities are identified: figure-ground, space, time, perspective, and topic. It is suggested that rhetorical relations between narrative units are mac~o labels that stand f...

The goal of our work is to improve the Natural Language feedback provided by Intelligent Tutoring Systems. In this paper, we discuss how to make the content presented by one such system more ¤uent and comprehensible, and we show how we accomplish this by using relatively inexpensive domain-independent text structuring techniques. We show how speci£c rhetorical relations can be introduced based ...