Nick Asher: (Invited): Constraints in Discourse: Part of a more general theory of rationality? SDRT promotes two central ideas relevant to constraints in discourse: (1) dynamic semantic update is constrained by discourse structure; (2) discourse coherence is a scalar phenomenon and so discourse structure construction should proceed by maximizing discourse coherence given the resources available...

Previous work by Lin et al. (2011) demonstrated the effectiveness of using discourse relations for evaluating text coherence. However, their work was based on discourse relations annotated in accordance with the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) (Prasad et al., 2008), which encodes only very shallow discourse structures; therefore, they cannot capture long-distance discourse dependencies. In this ...

This paper describes the extension of the Ontologies of Linguistic Annotation (OLiA) with respect to discourse features. The OLiA ontologies provide a a terminology repository that can be employed to facilitate the conceptual (semantic) interoperability of annotations of discourse phenomena as found in the most important corpora available to the community, including OntoNotes, the RST Discourse...

In this paper we present an overview of recent developments in discourse theory and parsing under the Linguistic Discourse Model (LDM) framework, a semantic theory of discourse structure. We give a novel approach to the problem of discourse segmentation based on discourse semantics and sketch a limited but robust approach to symbolic discourse parsing based on syntactic, semantic and lexical ru...

In this paper, we introduce LiveTree, a core component of LIDAS, the Linguistic Discourse Analysis System for automatic discourse parsing with the Unified Linguistic Discourse Model (U-LDM) (X et al, 2004). LiveTree is an integrated workbench for supervised and unsupervised creation, storage and manipulation of the discourse structure of text documents under the U-LDM. The LiveTree environment ...

We present a new compositional tense-aspect deindexing mechanism that makes use of tense trees as components of discourse contexts. The mechanism allows reference episodes to be correctly identified even for embedded clauses and for discourse that involves shifts in temporal perspective, and permits deindexed logical forms to be automatically computed with a small number of deindexing rules. 1 ...

We set forth general techniques for managing discourse in an intelligent tutor. These techniques are being implemented in a structure that dynamically reasons about the discourse, a student's response, and the tutor's move. The structure is flexible, domain-independent, and designed to be rebuilt-decision points and machine actions are modifiable through a visual editor. We discuss this formal ...

Critical pedagogy (CP), as a poststructuralist educational movement, challenges the asymmetrical, power-over nature of classroom discourse and seeks to accommodate multivocality in the classroom and in the society. This study probed the discourse architecture of EFL classrooms in Iran. Specifically, it aimed to explore to what extent Iranian EFL classrooms have stepped away from the teacher-dom...