The chiasmus is a rhetorical figure involving the repetition of a pair of words in reverse order, as in “all for one, one for all”. Previous work on detecting chiasmus in running text has only considered superficial features like words and punctuation. In this paper, we explore the use of syntactic features as a means to improve the quality of chiasmus detection. Our results show that taking sy...

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...

We find significant style differences between articles written by economists for their professional journals and articles by the same economists in the Wall Street Journal. We find no evidence that style influences the professional success of economists, which suggests that the private rewards to improving the quality of writing are low. Indeed, each community of scholars has probably adopted a...

This paper describes the improvement of the stylistic quality of the texts generated by the PRINCE system, a natural language generation application designed for building texts for simple fairy tales. This is done by exploiting the potential of a lexical resource such as WordNet and structure mapping algorithms to enhance the output texts with simple rhetorical tropes such as metaphor and analo...

In many applications in computational linguistics, such as machine translation, we want to understand why a writer has used language in a particular way, what specific effects she intended to convey, and which linguistic choices were made to achieve those goals. This idea, that a writer has specific communicative goals or intentions in mind when she composes text, goes back to the study of clas...

Researchers in discourse have long hypothesized that the nuclei of a rhetorical structure tree provide a good summary of the text for which that tree was built. In this paper, I discuss a psy-cholinguistic experiment that validates this hypothesis , but that also shows that the distinction between nuclei and satellites is not suucient if we want to build summaries of very high quality. I empiri...

We describe a classifier which determines the rhetorical status of sentences in texts from a corpus of judgments of the UK House of Lords. Our summarisation system is based on the work of Teufel and Moens where sentences are classified for rhetorical status to aid sentence selection. We experiment with a variety of linguistic features with results comparable to Teufel and Moens, thereby demonst...

This chapter defines professional communication in intercultural contexts. It presents a workable model of culture, connects that model to rhetoric, and provides a method to analyze rhetorics and cultures in intercultural contexts. It also contextualizes the model of intercultural rhetorical research in prevailing paradigms of rhetoric and professional communication, strongly criticizing the lo...

Many essential components of language charted by rhetoric, the ancient study of persuasion, remain understudied and underrepresented in current Natural Language systems. Our goal is to combine linguistic and rhetorical theories with discourse analysis and machine learning to develop formal models of computational rhetoric that may be usefully applied in real-world Computational Linguistics syst...

Hypermedia communicative devices are patterns of hypermedia presentation structure with specific affects on the user. Some devices have been determined for affecting the user with abstract authoring constructs, such as rhetorical structure. However, these devices each typically focus on particular aspects of the structure of hypermedia presentation. This paper presents a framework for hypermedi...