The aim of this research is to study effects of global and local structure of texts and of rhetorical relations between sentences on the prosodic realization of sentences in read aloud text. Twenty texts were analysed using Rhetorical Structure Theory. Based on these analyses, the global structure in terms of hierarchical level, the local structure in terms of the relative importance of text se...

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...

A number of researchers have investigated the use of planbased approaches to generate textual explanations (e.g., Appelt 1985; Hovy 1988; Moore 1989; Maybury 1990b). This paper extends this approach to generate multimedia explanations by defining three types of communicative acts: linguistic acts (illocutionary and locutionary speech acts), visual acts (e.g., deictic acts), and mediaindependent...

The paper deals with the cohesion part of a model of global discourse interpretation, usually known as Veins Theory (VT). By taking the notion of nuclearity (though ignoring relations), from the Rhetorical Structure Theory, VT computes strings of discourse units, called veins, from which domains of accessibility can be determined for each discourse unit. VT’s constructs best fit with an increme...

Having survived the «death of rhetoric» (R. BARTHES 1985: 115), metaphor has become the centre of intensive research by philosophers of language and linguists in the twentieth century. Nowadays it is widely accepted that metaphor is not reducible to «a sort of happy extra trick with words» (I. A. RICHARDS [1936] 1964: 90), but is rather said to be a fundamental principle of linguistic creativit...

This paper presents the integration of cohesive properties of text with coherence relations, to obtain an adequate representation of text for automatic summarization. A summarizer based on Lexical Chains is enchanced with rhetorical and argumentative structure obtained via Discourse Markers. When evaluated with newspaper corpus, this integration yields only slight improvement in the resulting s...

Synaesthesia takes place when ordinary stimuli elicit extraordinary conscious experiences. As a rhetorical figure, synaesthesia consists on giving a thing a quality that in fact it cannot have because the thing and the quality are perceived by different senses (e.g. “white noises”). But the physiological and the conceptual or linguistic realities are in fact part of a whole that can be approach...

This study explores the potential of a theory of discourse coherence relations to distinguish between truth and deception. It uses Rhetorical Structure Theory and logistic regression to build a deception model that achieves 78% accuracy on a sample of goldstandard Amazon book reviews drawn from the Deceptive Review corpus. It finds Contrast discourse relations to be a significant predictor of v...

Studies about rhetorical moves in the introduction section have been widely conducted. However, studies focusing on research problem statement is still limited. This current study investigated structures, strategies, and linguistic features of written by undergraduate students, which aimed to contribute teaching model academic writing. was a qualitative case belonging genre analysis, using Swal...

This paper explores the use of a simple and computational optimality theoretic pragmatics (OT pragmatics, OTP) to the analysis of the rhetorical structure of texts. It introduces this variant of OTP briefly and then shows that it can be applied to explain coherence, rhetorical relations, discourse trees and context dependence using the occasional extra premiss. It thereby improves on existing a...