Meta-discourse markers are an inevitable part of oral proficiency which improve both the quality and comprehension of learners’ speech. While studies of oral meta-discourse have been conducted since the 1980s in a European or US context, they have remained relatively untouched in Iran. Therefore, this study aimed to seek the impact of both explicit and implicit teaching of formal meta-discourse...

Discourse connectives (e.g. however, because) are terms that can explicitly convey a discourse relation within a text. While discourse connectives have been shown to be an effective clue to automatically identify discourse relations, they are not always used to convey such relations, thus they should first be disambiguated between discourse-usage and non-discourse-usage. In this paper, we inves...

We present a cross-lingual discourse relation analysis based on a parallel corpus with discourse information available only for one language. First, we conduct a corpus study to explore differences in discourse organization between Chinese and English, including differences in information packaging, implicit/explicit discourse expression divergence, and discourse connective ambiguities. Second,...

due to the significance of multiculturalism in politics, and the central role linguistic devices play in organizing the political discourse, this text-based qualitative study was carried out to compare political interviews in the iranian and english contexts to find out the probable similarities and differences in the use of discourse markers (dms) between the two cultures. to this end, three s...

This paper presents a brief description of Explanation-Based Learning (EBL), and argues that it is an approach to machine learning with signi cant potential for use in discourse processing. More speci cally, EBL can be used by systems that model discourse generation as goaldriven behavior, and that model discourse interpretation as recognizing the speaker's discourse goals. As evidence, we desc...

Records from the Multiple-Institution Database for Investigating Engineering Longitudinal Development indicate that engineering students are typical of students in other majors with respect to: persistence in major; persistence by gender and ethnicity; racial/ethnic distribution; and grade distribution. Data from the National Survey of Student Engagement show that this similarity extends to eng...

Discourse relation classification is an important component for automatic discourse parsing and natural language understanding. The performance bottleneck of a discourse parser comes from implicit discourse relations, whose discourse connectives are not overtly present. Explicit discourse connectives can potentially be exploited to collect more training data to collect more data and boost the p...

We present an implementation of a discourse parsing system for a lexicalized TreeAjoining Grammar for discourse, specifying the integration of sentence and discourse level processing. Our system is based on the assumption that the compositional aspects of semantics at the discourse-level parallel those at the sentence-level. This coupling is achieved by factoring away inferential semantics and ...