We examine how nonveridical markers and rhetorical relations contribute to the expression of Appraisal (evaluation) in discourse. First, we define nonveridicality and nonveridical contexts, following Giannakidou (Polarity Sensitivity as (Non)Veridical Dependency. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1998). We then relate nonveridicality to modality, Appraisal and rhetorical relations, and present a map o...

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 ...

This article offers a rhetorical design perspective on persuasive technology design, introducing Bitzer’s method of the rhetorical situation. As a case study, knowledge workers in an industrial engineering corporation are examined using Bitzer’s method. Introducing a new system, knowledge workers are to be given the task of innovating and maintaining business processes, thus contributing with c...

In this article, we present the on-line interface that we have developed for the RST Spanish Treebank, the first corpus including Spanish texts annotated with rhetorical relations. This interface allows users to consult or download the texts and their corresponding annotations. In addition, it allows carrying out several tasks over a selected subcorpus: searching statistics in terms of words, r...

In recent years linguistic research has turned increasing attention to covert/overt strategies to modulate authorial stance and positioning in scientific texts, and to the recipients' response. This study discussed some theoretical implications of the use of rhetoric in scientific communication and analysed qualitative data from the authoritative The Cognitive Neurosciences III (2004) volume. I...

This paper investigates whether the model of local rhetorical coherence suggested in Knott et al. (2001) can boost the performance of the Centering-based metrics of entity coherence employed by Karamanis et al. (2004) for the task of information ordering. Rhetorical coherence is integrated into the way Centering’s basic data structures are derived from the annotated features of the GNOME corpus...

The study we report in this article addresses the results of comparing the rhetorical trees from two different languages carried out by two annotators starting from the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Furthermore, we investigate the methodology for a suitable evaluation, both quantitative and qualitative, of these trees. Our corpus contains abstracts of medical research articles written both...

In this article, we propose a novel method for generating engaging multi-modal content automatically from text. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is used to decompose text into discourse units and to identify rhetorical discourse relations between them. Rhetorical relations are then mapped to question–answer pairs in an information preserving way, i.e., the original text and the resulting dialo...