The Text2Dialogue (T2D) system that we are developing allows digital content creators to generate attractive multi-modal dialogues presented by two virtual agents—by simply providing textual information as input. We use Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to decompose text into segments and to identify rhetorical discourse relations between them. These are then “acted out” by two 3D agents using ...

We discuss a tagging schema and a tagging tool for labeling the rhetorical structure of texts. We also propose a statistical method for measuring agreement of hierarchical structure annotations and we discuss its strengths and weaknesses. The statistical measure we use suggests that annotators can achieve good levels of agreement on the task of determining the high-level, rhetorical structure o...

This paper introduces an approach to generate video clips starting from an annotated commentary. The novelty of the approach lies in the use of rhetorical structure of the accompanying audio commentary in planning the video. The basic notions of cinematography are briefly introduced together with the Rhetorical Relation Theory to model the structure of a discourse. Then, the architecture of a v...

This study investigates the prosody of rhetorical questions in German. In an interaction study we examined how speakers use boundary tones, pitch, duration and voice quality to mark syntactically ambiguous questions as rhetorical or information seeking. To this end, speakers produced identical interrogatives (polar and wh questions) in rhetorical and information seeking contexts. The results sh...

This paper discusses a fundamental problem in natural language generation: how to organize the content of a text in a coherent and natural way. In this research, we set out to determine the semantic content and the rhetorical structure of texts and to develop heuristics to perform this process automatically within a text generation framework. The study was performed on a specific language and t...

The oral case presentation is an important communicative activity in the teaching and assessment of students. Despite its importance, not much attention has been paid to providing support for teachers to teach this difficult task to medical students who are novices to this form of communication. As a formalized piece of talk that takes a regularized form and used for a specific communicative go...

The introduction is a pivotal sub-genre in academic writing because of its rhetorical role determining whether written work necessary and worth reading. A significant body research has examined the structure introductions different text genres, such as articles dissertations. However, little investigated moves undergraduate students’ essays, particularly Saudi context. Therefore, this study aim...

A 3-manifold with marked boundary is a pair (M, X), where M is a compact 3-manifold whose (possibly empty) boundary is made up of tori and Klein bottles, and X is a trivalent graph that is a spine of ∂M . A standard skeleton of a 3-manifold with marked boundary (M, X) is a standard sub-polyhedron P of M such that P ∩∂M coincides with X and with ∂P , and such that P ∪ ∂M is a spine of M \ B (whe...

This contrastive study, in the first place, examined the generic structure and, in the second place, explored the face theory proposed by Arundale (2006) in 140 doctoral dissertation acknowledgments written by native speakers of Persian (NSP) and native speakers of English (NSE) in 7 disciplines representing soft sciences to find out what discourse genre components writers employ to articulate ...

This paper presents an approach towards the definition of a formal framework for rhetorical argumentation. Before describing the competence theory behind the framework, we introduce the notion of rhetorical argument, and describe the New Rhetoric, a well known theory in the philosophy of argumentation, upon which our work is based.