New evidence is provided for a grammatical principle that singles out contrastive focus (Rooth 1996; Truckenbrodt 1995) and distinguishes it from discourse-new “informational” focus. Since the prosody of discourse-given constituents may also be distinguished from discourse-new, a three-way distinction in representation is motivated. It is assumed that an F-feature marks just contrastive focus (...

Contrastive summarization is the problem of jointly generating summaries for two entities in order to highlight their differences. In this paper we present an investigation into contrastive summarization through an implementation and evaluation of a contrastive opinion summarizer in the consumer reviews domain.

Previous eye tracking studies [1] demonstrated that a prominent L+H* accent in English instructions evoked a contrastive relationship between discourse referents, immediately guiding listeners’ eye movements to contrastive candidates in the visual scene. However, the visual layout in the previous study conflated looks to contrastive candidates with those to previously fixated object groups, thu...

This tiiesis addresses a difficult problem in text processing: crealing a System lo automalically dérive rhetorical structures o f text. Allhough thè rhelorical structure lias proven to be useful in many fields o f text processing sucli as text summarisation and information extraction, Systems that auiomalically generate rhetorical structures with high accuracy are difficult to find. This is bc...

in order to develop an understanding of the rhetorical conventions in the persian language and to find out the metadiscursive cultural norms of iranian writers in their native language writings, it is necessary to probe into the implicit rhetorical features of academic writing which has so far eluded a comprehensive systematic characterization. metadiscourse marking, which is supposed to be one...

Discourse structure is the hidden link between surface features and document-level properties, such as sentiment polarity. We show that the discourse analyses produced by Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) parsers can improve document-level sentiment analysis, via composition of local information up the discourse tree. First, we show that reweighting discourse units according to their position i...

A question may be asked not only to elicit information, but also to make a statement. Questions serving the latter purpose, called rhetorical questions, are often lexically and syntactically indistinguishable from other types of questions. Still, it is desirable to be able to identify rhetorical questions, as it is relevant for many NLP tasks, including information extraction and text summariza...

We were focusing on the core test. One primary and two contrastive systems were submitted. Primary system was a fusion of all GMM-UBM, SVM-GSV and SVM-GLDS systems described in this paper. The first contrastive system was a fusion of GMM-UBM based systems described in Section 3.1, the next was a fusion of SVM based systems described in Section 3.2. All the submitted scores can be interpreted as...