The present paper focused on the sociocultural explanations of rhetorical differences between English and Persian and was based on the contrastive genre analysis of Applied Linguistics research article abstracts in these two languages. The evolutionary nature of research article abstracts was also investigated from 1985 to 2005, in three stages, with a time interval of 10 years. Seventy eight r...

We present experiments in using discourse structure for improving machine translation evaluation. We first design two discourse-aware similarity measures, which use all-subtree kernels to compare discourse parse trees in accordance with the Rhetorical Structure Theory. Then, we show that these measures can help improve a number of existing machine translation evaluation metrics both at the segm...

Fine-grained sentiment analysis on the Web has received much attention in recent years. In this paper we suggest an approach to Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis that incorporates structural information of reviews by employing Rhetorical Structure Theory. First, a novel way of determining the context of an aspect is presented, after which a full path analysis is performed on the found context tre...

In this paper, we address one of the central problems in text generation: the missing link ("the generation gap" in Meteer's terms) between the global discourse organization as often provided by text planning modules and the linguistic realization of this organization. We argue that the link should be established by the lexical choice proces s using resources derived from Mel'~uk's Lezical Func...

In this paper the research focus is on the task of answer extraction for why-questions. As opposed to techniques for factoid QA, finding answers to whyquestions involves exploiting text structure. Therefore, we approach the answer extraction problem as a discourse analysis task, using Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) as framework. We evaluated this method using a set of why-questions that have...

The Didactic Networks proposed in this paper are based on previous publications in the field of the RSR (Rhetorical-Semantic Relations). The RSR is a set of primitive relations used for building a specific kind of semantic networks for artificial intelligence applications on the web: the RSN (Rhetorical-Semantic Networks). We bring into focus the RSR application in the field of elearning, by de...

Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) has been in constant research for a number of years. The different parts of a text are called text spans. RST helps in organizing these text spans. These text spans are connected with each other by Discourse markers. In this paper, we are exploring the possibility of realizing some RST relations (CONTRAST, SEQUENCE and PARALLEL) from multi-nuclear sentences in ...

We present a tagging schema and a tagging tool for labeling the rhetorical structure of texts. We focus on presenting the difficulties that we faced in designing a discourse annotation manual and on discussing the choices that we made in order to address these difficulties. We report reliability results concerning our agreement on building the rhetorical structure of 90 texts of three genres: 3...

Discourse markers foreshadow the message thrust of texts and saliently guide their rhetorical structure which are important for content filtering and text abstraction. This paper reports on efforts to automatically identify and classify discourse markers in Chinese texts using heuristic-based and corpus-based data-mining methods, as an integral part of automatic text summarization via rhetorica...

The explosion in the number of students taking online courses warrants a deeper understanding of instructor strategies that meet rhetorical and relational goals. Guided by social presence theory and rhetorical and relational goals theory, 329 participants were randomly assigned into one of three manipulated social presence online learning conditions to watch a short lecture. The student percept...