A spontaneously spoken, natural Japanese discourse contains many instances of the so-called redundant interjections and of back-channel utterances. These expressions have not hitherto received much attention and few systematic analyses have been made, since they were regarded as useless, spurious expressions. On the basis of the analysis of spoken dialogue corpus, we claim that these utterances...

The paper presents a preliminary study on discourse connectives (DC) in Czech. Aiming to build a computerized language corpus capturing discourse relations in Czech, we base our observations on current foreign projects with the same purpose. In this study, first, the different methods of linguistic analysis of the discourse structure and discourse connectives are described, next, the nature and...

In this paper we study the utility of discourse structure for spoken dialogue performance modeling. We experiment with various ways of exploiting the discourse structure: in isolation, as context information for other factors (correctness and certainty) and through trajectories in the discourse structure hierarchy. Our correlation and PARADISE results show that, while the discourse structure is...

This paper presented a multimodal discourse analysis of some visual images in the political rally discourse of 2011 electioneering campaigns in Southwestern Nigeria. The data comprised purposively selected political visual artefacts from political rallies across the six Southwestern States in Nigeria (Osun, Oyo, Ondo, Ekiti, Ogun, and Lagos). The data were analyzed using Halliday’s (1985) syste...

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...

The study of discourse can be undertaken from different perspectives (e.g., linguistic, cognitive, or computational) with differing purposes in mind (e.g., to study language use or to analyze social practices). The aim of Discourse on the Move is to show that it is possible and profitable to join quantitative and qualitative analyses to study discourse structures. Whereas corpus-based quantitat...