A spontaneously spoken, natural Japanese discourse contains many instances of the so-called redundant interjections and of back-channel utterances. These expressions have not hitherto received much attention and few systematic analyses have been made, since they were regarded as useless, spurious expressions. On the basis of the analysis of spoken dialogue corpus, we claim that these utterances...

A natural and intuitive principle concerning the organization of content in discourse is that discourse structure and rhetorical function operate at several levels of granularity at once. There are low level discourse connections between elementary discourse units (EDUs), even within a single sentence; but there are also discourse connections between larger constituents, complex discourse units...

Discourse markers, also known as clue words, are used extensively in human-human task-oriented dialogs to signal the structure of the discourse. Previous work showed their importance in monologs and social conversations for marking discourse structure , but little attention has been paid to their importance in spoken dialog systems. This paper investigates what discourse markers signal about th...

The Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) was released to the public in 2008 and remains the largest corpus of manually annotated discourse relations — both relations that are signaled explicitly (e.g., by a coordinating or subordinating conjunction, or by a discourse adverbial or other construction) and ones that otherwise appear implicit. The Penn Discourse TreeBank also diverges from other discours...

Computational approaches to discourse understanding have a two-part goal: (1) to identify those aspects of discourse understanding that require process-based accounts, and (2)to characterize the processes and data structures they involve. To date, in the area of reference, process-based accounts have been developed for subsequent reference via anaphoric pronouns and reference via definite descr...

The explicit consideration of an addressee’s inferences during discourse planning affects the content and coherence of the generated discourse. The content of the discourse is affected because the consideration of an addressee’s inferences may require the addition of information that addresses erroneous inferences or suggest the omission of easily inferred information. The coherence of the disc...

The identification of discourse units is an essential step in discourse parsing, the automatic construction of a discourse structure from a text. We present a rule-based algorithm to identify elementary discourse units (EDUs) in Dutch written text. Contrary to approaches that focus on the determination of segment boundaries, we identify complete discourse units, which is especially helpful for ...

Discourse relations bind smaller linguistic units into coherent texts. Automatically identifying discourse relations is difficult, because it requires understanding the semantics of the linked arguments. A more subtle challenge is that it is not enough to represent the meaning of each argument of a discourse relation, because the relation may depend on links between lowerlevel components, such ...

Litman and Allen are concerned with the relationship between plan recognition in discourse and the underlying commonsense structures that are necessary to support the discourse. Building around a train-trip scenario, they demonstrate the importance of commonsense understanding of plans to the ability to analyze a discourse revolving around this plan. In this capacity they make the distinction b...

In the world of linguistics, term “discourse” is often used in many scientific works devoted to study text problems. As V. Hegay rightly points out, although widely linguistics as well fields literature, sociology, political science, philosophy, logic, psychology, itself has a unique, accepted interpretation, meaningless, express variety different concepts.