The availability of huge amounts of online opinions has created a new need to develop effective query-based opinion summarizers to analyze this information in order to facilitate decision making at every level. To develop an effective opinion summarization approach, we have targeted to resolve specifically Question Irrelevancy and Discourse Incoherency problems which have been found to be the m...

This study examined the effect of two different authentic topic-familiar rhetorical L2 listening tasks (expository and argumentative) differing in reasoning demand on the listening comprehension scores of a number of Iranian EFL advanced learners. Sixty homogeneous advanced learners were recruited based on their performance on an English Language Proficiency test (Fowler & Coe, 1976). Then they...

In this chapter we review and describe principles of rhetorical organisation in Chinese. We start at the level of phrase and sentence, moving to the ordering of complex clauses. Chapter 7 continues the discussion and considers these principles of rhetorical organisation operating at the level of discourse. During the discussion we touch on the role that Western influence played on the sequencin...

In many applications in computational linguistics, such as machine translation, we want to understand why a writer has used language in a particular way, what specific effects she intended to convey, and which linguistic choices were made to achieve those goals. This idea, that a writer has specific communicative goals or intentions in mind when she composes text, goes back to the study of clas...

While quite a few linguistic corpora with syntactic annotations are available today, resources are scarce on the level of discourse annotation. A flexible, extendible annotation format speeds up development. We therefore propose an XML format for annotating rhetorical structure trees. In human and automatic analysis, rhetorical structure is often difficult and assigned incrementally. Thus, the ...

Discourse structure is the hidden link between surface features and document-level properties, such as sentiment polarity. We show that the discourse analyses produced by Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) parsers can improve document-level sentiment analysis, via composition of local information up the discourse tree. First, we show that reweighting discourse units according to their position i...

Research on citations has generally examined citations as part of a system of rewards or as a rhetorical tool for strengthening arguments. This study examines the role of citations both as reward and as rhetoric. The reward system was examined by tracing over time the citation patterns of 13 research articles by two groups of scientists in chaos theory. The rhetorical practices were examined by...

The goal of this research was to find a way to extend the capabilities of computers through the processing of language in a more human way, and present applications which demonstrate the power of this method. This research presents a novel approach, Rhetorical Analysis, to solving problems in Natural Language Processing (NLP). The main benefit of Rhetorical Analysis, as opposed to previous appr...