The utihty of rhetorical abstractions and certain text planning mechanisms were assessed from the standpoint of accounting for how an explainer chooses and structures content under multiple perspectives to meet knowledge communication goals. This paper discusses ways in which they were found to be inadequate, argues for greater emphasis on an epistemological level of analysis, and proposes a mi...

We present a pipelined architecture for a text simplification system and describe our implementation of the three stages— analysis, transformation and regeneration. Our architecture allows each component to be developed and evaluated independently. We lay particular emphasis on the discourse level aspects of syntactic simplification as these are crucial to the process and have not been dealt wi...

Attentional State Theory and Rhetorical Structure Theory are two predominant theories of discourse parsing. Combining these two approaches, in this paper, we describe a novel approach for discourse parsing. The resulting discourse tree structure retains following properties: structure of purpose from Attentional State Theory and relations between sentences from Rhetorical Structure Theory. We d...

Successful machine tutoring, like other forms of ~~mamnachine discourse, requires sophisticated communication skills and a deep understanding of the student’s knowledge. A system must have the ability to reason about a student’s knowledge and to assess the effect of the discourse on him. In this paper we describe Meno-tutor, a LISP program that deliberately Plans the rhetorical structure of its...

Quotations are kernels not just of wisdom but also of beautiful and striking language. While recent studies have characterized the stylistic features of quotations, we characterize the order of stylistic information within quotations. Analyzing a corpus of two-sentence quotations collected from the social network Tumblr, we explore the ways that both low-level features and high-level features t...

Different language markers can be used to reveal the differences between structures of truthful and deceptive (fake) news. Two experiments are held: the first one is based on lexics level markers, the second one on discourse level is based on rhetorical relations categories (frequencies). Corpus consists of 174 truthful and deceptive news stories in Russian. Support Vector Machines and Random F...

The study of argumentation has undergone periods of decadence alternate with periods of renaissance. Currently, we are witnessing one of the latter, as proved by research flowering in many issues and aspects, both in Philosophy and in Artificial Intelligence. The work presented in this thesis is concerned in particular with “rhetorical argumentation”, which on the other hand has enjoyed conside...

Then he went about his regular, non-Twitter affairs. The next afternoon, fresh from a nap, he checked his account, stared at the outcome, and tweeted to @upulieto, an associate, “I just woke up. What a mess” [49]. His tweet had spiraled virally: tens of thousands of likes, retweets, endless streams of commentary. Why? Well, lots of factors, of course. There is rarely a single factor to which on...