We describe ongoing work in semi-automatic annotating corpus, with the goal to answer “why” question in question answering system and give a construction of the coherent tree for text summarization. In this paper we present annotation schemas for identifying the discourse relations that hold between the parts of text as well as the particular textual of span that are related via the discourse r...

This thesis is two fold. The first part deals with an existence proof of a formal algorithm that takes a narrative discourse and returns its semantic representation in the Event Calculus (EC from now on) [19]. This algorithm uses Discourse Representation Theory, and takes on the form of a translation from Discourse Representation Structures to Scenarios and Integrity Constraints in EC. The seco...

We describe a generic set of tools for representing, annotating, and analyzing multi-party discourse, including: an ontology of multimodal discourse, a programming interface for that ontology, and NOMOS – a flexible and extensible toolkit for browsing and annotating discourse. We describe applications built using the NOMOS framework to facilitate a real annotation task, as well as for visualizi...

Task allocation is a critical issue in proper engineering of cooperative applications in embedded systems with latency and energy constraints, as in wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs). Existing task allocation algorithms are mostly concerned with energy savings and ignore time constraints and thus increase the makespan of tasks in the network as well as the probability of malfunctioning...

We consider the following scheduling setting: a set of tasks have to be executed on a set of identical machines. It is well known that shortest processing time (SPT) schedules are optimal for the problem of minimizing the total sum of completion times of the tasks. In this paper, we measure the quality of SPT schedules, from an approximation point of view, with respect to the following optimali...

We propose designing a discourse parser specifically for the evaluative text genre. We aim to see whether focusing on a certain genre and relations specific to that genre offers performance gain beyond more generic discourse parsers. In this extended abstract we describe the approach we intend to take, and how this differs from what has been done previously. The problem of discourse parsing It ...

Faster completion of projects continues to be an important problem in project management. The traditional approach to reduce completion time has been to shorten the time required for performing a particular activity, often called crashing. In this paper, we propose the addition of two related approaches to expedite a project: increasing the parallel processing of tasks by completely removing pr...

This paper describes our submission to the CoNLL-2015 shared task on discourse parsing. We factor the pipeline into subcomponents which are then used to form the final sequential architecture. Focusing on achieving good performance when inferring explicit discourse relations, we apply maximum entropy and recurrent neural networks to different sub-tasks such as connective identification, argumen...

Maintaining cognitive control while pursuing several tasks at the same time is hard, especially when the current problem states of these tasks need to be represented in memory. We are investigating the mutual influence of a self-paced and a reactive task with regard to completion time and error rates. Against initial expectations, the interruptions from the reactive task did not lead to more er...