This paper presents a novel approach to discourse analysis within information extraction systems. It makes use of DRT as formal representation of the linguistic context as well as of a domain-specific ontology as a basis to compute conceptual relations between extracted events thus establishing discourse coherence. The approach has been implemented within GenIE, an information extraction system...

This paper is a preliminary study of address terms based on a small corpus of talk by members of a New Zealand rugby team collected using ethnographic fieldwork. The paper first looks at how address terms are used by different Communities of Practice within the rugby team then goes on to analyse the range of discourse functions of the speech acts that contain the address terms. A comparison of ...

This paper, which is based on a multimodal corpus of conversational French, aims at describing some prosodic and gestural characteristics of the three discourse markers ‘donc’ (‘so’), ‘alors’ (‘so’ or ‘then’) and ‘en fait’ (‘in fact’). The pragmatic functions of ‘donc’ and ‘alors’ have been deeply analyzed in a few studies (Mosegaard-Hansen [9], Vlemings [12] and Zénone [13, 14]) but none of th...

A key aspect of conversation is the interactive exchange of information and the cooperative discourse process that functions to bring about a mutually satisfactory sharing of information. The encountering of new information gives rise to emotional responses as well as on the certainty and degree of cognitive reorientation to the pre-existing knowledge state. In this study we present our results...

Hints are an important ingredient of natural language tutorial dialogues. Existing models of hints, however, are limited in capturing their various underlying functions, since hints are typically treated as a unit directly associated with some problem solving script or discourse situation. Putting emphasis on making cognitive functions of hints explicit, we present a multi-dimensional hint taxo...

One of the common features of decision–theoretic rough set models is that they rely on total background (available) knowledge in the sense that the knowledge covers the discourse universe. In the proposed framework the author gives up this requirement and allows that available knowledge about the discourse universe may be partial. It is shown by introducing optimistic, average and pessimistic p...

Lexical bundles are empirically derived formulaic units of language which are register-specifi c and perform a variety of discourse functions. Because these units of language contribute to the linguistic make up of specifi c registers, they can be important indicators for determining the success of language users within these discourse communities. Therefore, language learners need to assimilat...

In spite of their important quantitative role, discourse particles have so far been neglected in automatic speech processing for two reasons: Firstly it is not clear what they may contribute to the aims of automatic speech processing, and secondly their functions seem to vary so much that it seems difficult to identify the information relevant to such aims. The approach presented here therefore...