In this paper we investigate whether unsupervised models can be used to induce conventional aspects of rhetorical language in scientific writing. We rely on the intuition that the rhetorical language used in a document is general in nature and independent of the document’s topic. We describe a Bayesian latent-variable model that implements this intuition. In two empirical evaluations based on t...

Most scientific papers have their own rhetorical structures, which have deeply rooted in the minds of both authors and readers, such as background, problem and discussion. However, most existing search engines for scientific publications haven‘t made good use of such semantic information. In fact, each reader would be interested in different semantic modules of a paper, that is, certain concept...

Efficient and relevant retrieval of any type of the data, especially multimedia objects, is based on indexing technique. Due to complexity of multimedia data, existing indexing techniques for multimedia objects suffer from irrelevant retrieval. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) has already been successfully implemented for indexing text documents, which has reduced irrelevancy. The focus of thi...

The chiasmus is a rhetorical figure involving the repetition of a pair of words in reverse order, as in “all for one, one for all”. Previous work on detecting chiasmus in running text has only considered superficial features like words and punctuation. In this paper, we explore the use of syntactic features as a means to improve the quality of chiasmus detection. Our results show that taking sy...

Rhetorical Structure Theory has enjoyed continuous attention since its origins in the 1980s. It has been applied, compared to other approaches, and also criticized in a number of areas in discourse analysis, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. In this paper, we review some of the discussions about the theory itself, especially addressing issues of the reli...

Introduction Most current formal theories of discourse incorporate some insight concerning the contribution of aspect to discourse structure, and many draw upon Hans Kamp’s analysis of the aspectual contribution of tenses, as well as Vlach’s notion of tenses as aspect-shift operators (cf. Vlach 1981). Thus, Kamp & Rohrer (1983) argue that the French imparfait acts as a ‘stativizer’, mapping non...

One of the stylistic features of Hafez’s sonnets is the repetition of a part of the meaning of the first line in the second line. His knowledge of the rhetorical and semantic relations of vocabularies enabled him to repeat the meaning with the least verbal repetition. One of the ways that has helped him to achieve this goal is replicating the concepts in two parts of the couplet based on rhetor...

Polarity estimation in large-scale and multi-topic domains is a difficult issue. Most state-of-the-art solutions essentially rely on frequencies of sentiment-carrying words (e.g., taken from a lexicon) when analyzing the sentiment conveyed by natural language text. These approaches ignore the structural aspects of a document, which contain valuable information. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST)...

In this paper, we propose a novel Rhetorical Structure Index (RSI) to measure the structural importance of a word or a phrase. Unlike TF-IDF and other content-driven measurements, RSI identifies words or phrases that are structural cues in an unstructured document. We show structurally motivated features with high RSI values are more useful than content-driven features for applications such as ...