Discourse relation parsing is an important task with the goal of understanding text beyond the sentence boundaries. With the availability of annotated corpora (Penn Discourse Treebank) statistical discourse parsers were developed. In the literature it was shown that the discourse parsing subtasks of discourse connective detection and relation sense classification do not generalize well across d...

In this paper, a computational framework is presented for the generation of elementary speech acts to establish conceptual alignment between a computer system and its user. We clearly distinguish between two phases of the alignment process: message interpretation and message generation. In the interpretation phase, presuppositions are extracted from the user’s message and compared with the syst...

A detailed description of the discourse context of a word can be used for predicting word pronunciation in discourse context and also enables studies of the interplay between various types of information on e.g. phone-level pronunciation. The work presented in this paper is aimed at modelling systematic variation in the phone-level realisation of words inherent to a language variety. A data-dri...

This study describes a new corpus of over 60,000 hand-annotated metadiscourse acts from 106 OpenCourseWare lectures, from two different disciplines: Physics and Economics. Metadiscourse is a set of linguistic expressions that signal different functions in the discourse. This type of language is hypothesised to be helpful in finding a structure in unstructured text, such as lectures discourse. A...

Traditionally user interfaces to databases have either assumed complete knowledge of the conceptual schema of the database or they have relied on the utilization of predefined views to restrict the universe of discourse for end users or application programmers. This paper introduces an interface mechanism to dynamically derive personalized views and consequently a dynamic learning facility for ...

Forms of Japanese referring expressions are mainly divided into four types: bare NPs, demonstrative NPs (i.e. either as determiner or as pronoun) and zero pronouns. Out of the four types of the referring expressions, bare NPs are the most common type as a subsequent mention and zero pronouns are used only in limited conditions. Based on the centering framework, the results suggest that the cent...

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