In recent proposals for the crucial internal structure of the framing Contextual Component within Functional Discourse Grammar (Hengeveld & Mackenzie 2006, 2008) — for example by Rijkhoff (2008:88-97) and Connolly (2007) —, what is here called text is considered as equivalent to discourse within an account of the NP (Rijkhoff) or of context (Connolly). The article purports to show that this con...

We introduce a simple and effective method to learn discourse-specific word embeddings (DSWE) for implicit discourse relation recognition. Specifically, DSWE is learned by performing connective classification on massive explicit discourse data, and capable of capturing discourse relationships between words. On the PDTB data set, using DSWE as features achieves significant improvements over base...

Translation of discourse relations is one of the recent efforts of incorporating discourse information to statistical machine translation (SMT). While existing works focus on disambiguation of ambiguous discourse connectives, or transformation of discourse trees, only explicit discourse relations are tackled. A greater challenge exists in machine translation of Chinese, since implicit discourse...

This paper concentrates on peculiar behaviors of an English word, else, among various lexical items which have to do with the exceptive constructions. Reviewing its intriguing properties, it is argued that a simple way of reducing an "exception" from the domain of quantification and a more enriched domain of quantification, containing at least pairs of individuals, are preferable.

The annotations of explicit and implicit discourse connectives in the Penn Discourse Treebank make it possible to investigate on a large scale how different types of discourse relations are expressed. Assuming an account of the Uniform Information Density hypothesis, we expect that discourse relations should be expressed explicitly with a discourse connector when they are unexpected, but may be...

This work aims to explore the correlation between the discourse structure of a spoken monologue and its prosody by predicting discourse relations from different prosodic attributes. For this purpose, a corpus of semi-spontaneous monologues in English has been automatically annotated according to the Rhetorical Structure Theory, which models coherence in text via rhetorical relations. From corre...

In this paper, we address the task of automatically determining which discourse relation holds between two text spans. We focus on relations that are not explicitly signalled by a discourse marker like but. While lexical models have been found useful for the task, they are also prone to data sparseness problems, which is a big drawback given the scarcity of discourse annotated data. We therefor...

In this paper, we address the task of automatically determining which discourse relation holds between two text spans. We focus on relations that are not explicitly signalled by a discourse marker like but. While lexical models have been found useful for the task, they are also prone to data sparseness problems, which is a big drawback given the scarcity of discourse annotated data. We therefor...