We present an implementation of a discourse parsing system for a lexicalized Tree-Ajoining Grammar for discourse, specifying the integration of sentence and discourse level processing. Our system is based on the assumption that the compositional aspects of semantics at the discourse-level parallel those at the sentence-level. This coupling is achieved by factoring away inferential semantics and...

The early twentieth-century nationalist discourse in Iran reviled, on the one hand, a Qajar hegemony on account of an exhausted “manifest destiny,” and lauded, on the other, a discourse of masculinity that assumed moral responsibility to protect the imaginary “geobody” of Iran. In this paper I examine how this discourse of patriotism resonates through Mehdi Akhavan-Sales’s poem “This Autumn in ...

At present, discourse parsing is an important research topic. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is one of the most popular approaches in this field. In general, discourse parsing includes three stages: discourse segmentation, discourse relations detection and building up rhetorical trees. Different strategies are used when developing discourse parsers. One of the strategies to detect discourse ...

Text complexity can be reduced by making different choices at the lexical and grammatical levels. However, discourse-level choices may also affect a text’s complexity. In a coherent text, explicit discourse relations (e.g. CAUSE, CONDITION) are expressed using discourse markers (e.g. since, because, etc.) that may be preferred for texts at different readability levels. In this paper, we investi...

This commentary on the Editorial ‘The politics and analytics of health policy’ by Professor Calum Paton focuses on two issues. First, it points to the unclear links between ideas, ideology, values, and discourse and policy, and warns that discourse is often a poor guide to enacted policy. Second, it suggests that realism, particularly ‘programme theory’ are useful tools for health policy analys...

This article presents an overview of the notion of layering in three types of structuralfunctional grammars. Layering is interpreted in a broad sense to refer to two types of linguistic differentiations: (1) on the one hand, a distinction between levels of coding, namely, syntax/grammar, semantics, pragmatics; (2) on the other hand, a differentiation between speaker-related vs. content-related ...

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...