Many lawyers lack a basic understanding of the structure and process of legal argumentation. Their limited understanding, which often leads to less than effective advocacy, stems from legal education's failure to make the structure and process of legal argument explicit and systematic. One approach to this problem is to explore the intrinsic relationship of law to rhetoric. Because law and rhet...

This exploratory study investigated the rhetorical structure of three research proposals written by students who successfully sought entry into MA/PhD programs in applied linguistics at a Singapore university. Despite the abundance of research on published academic texts (such as the research article), not much is known about research proposals written for degree admission purposes, which are i...

Clauses and sentences rarely stand on their own in an actual discourse; rather, the relationship between them carries important information that allows the discourse to express a meaning as a whole beyond the sum of its individual parts. Rhetorical analysis seeks to uncover this coherence structure. In this article, we present CODRA— a COmplete probabilistic Discriminative framework for perform...

A question may be asked not only to elicit information, but also to make a statement. Questions serving the latter purpose, called rhetorical questions, are often lexically and syntactically indistinguishable from other types of questions. Still, it is desirable to be able to identify rhetorical questions, as it is relevant for many NLP tasks, including information extraction and text summariza...

Casual online forums such as Reddit, Slashdot and Digg, are continuing to increase in popularity as a means of communication. Detecting disagreement in this domain is a considerable challenge. Many topics are unique to the conversation on the forum, and the appearance of disagreement may be much more subtle than on political blogs or social media sites such as twitter. In this analysis we prese...