Right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) rarely causes aphasias marked by clear and widespread failures of comprehension or extreme difficulty producing fluent speech. Nonetheless, subtle language comprehension deficits can occur following unilateral RHD. In this article, we review the empirical record on discourse function following right hemisphere damage, as well as relevant work on non-brain dam...

An eye tracking study investigated the effects of local and global discourse context on the processing of subject and object relative clauses, whereby the contexts favored either a subject relative clause interpretation or an object relative clause interpretation. The fixation data replicated previous studies showing that object relative clause sentences were more difficult to process than subj...

This paper is motivated by the automation of neuropsychological tests involving discourse analysis in the retellings of narratives by patients with potential cognitive impairment. In this scenario the task of sentence boundary detection in speech transcripts is important as discourse analysis involves the application of Natural Language Processing tools, such as taggers and parsers, which depen...

The motivation for this adjunct test came from an exploratory s tudy done by Beth Sundheim during MUC-3. This s tudy showed a degradation in correctness of message processing as the information distribution in the message became more complex, that is, as slot fills were drawn from larger portions of the message and required more discourse processing to extract the information and reassemble it ...

Discourse relations between two text segments play an important role in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The connectives strongly indicate the sense of discourse relations, while in fact, there are no connectives in a large proportion of discourse relations, i.e., implicit discourse relations. The key for implicit relation prediction is to correctly model the semantics of the two d...

A text parsing component designed to be part of a system that assists students in academic reading an writing is presented. The parser can automatically add a relational discourse structure annotation to a scientific article that a user wants to explore. The discourse structure employed is defined in an XML format and is based the Rhetorical Structure Theory. The architecture of the parser comp...

The goal of the CLARITY project is to explore the use of discourse structure in the understanding of conversational speech. Within project CLARITY we aim to develop automatic classifiers for three levels of discourse structure in Spanish telephone conversations: speech acts, dialogue games, and discourse segments. This paper presents our first results and research plans in three areas: definiti...

This paper presents a new model of anaphoric processing that utilizes the establishment of coherence relations between clauses in a discourse. We survey data that comprises a currently stalemated argument over whether VP-ellipsis is an inherently syntactic or inherently semantic phenomenon, and show that the data can be handled within a uniform discourse processing architecture. This architectu...

In this paper we report on our e orts to combine speech and language processing toward multi-lingual spontaneous speech translation. The ongoing work extends our JANUS system e ort toward handling spontaneous spoken discourse and multiple languages. A major objective of this project is to maximize the number of modules, methods and data structures that are language-independent and extensible to...

We present in this article the results of experiments we led concerning disfluencies in the discourse of schizophrenic patients (in remediation). These experiments are part of a larger study dealing with other levels of linguistic analysis, that could eventually help identifying clues leading to the diagnostic of the disease. This study largely relies on natural language processing tools, which...