Given a recording of a lecture, one cannot easily locate a topic of interest, or skim for important points. However, by presenting the user with a summary of a discourse, listening to speech can be made more efficient. One approach to the problem of summarizing and skimming speech has been termed "emphasis detection." This study evaluates an emphasis detection approach by comparing the speech s...

Literature and Cognition applies methods and ideas from computational linguistics and cognitive science to literature. It explores a wide range of topics, and is intended to be read by literary theorists as well as by computational linguists and cognitive scientists. From the perspective of computational linguistics, the largest contributions are to present Hobbs's previously published theory o...

    A review of previous research on receptive skills among EFL learners  reveals that in contrast  to extensive research in reading, fewer studies have focused on the process  of listening comprehension in EFL contexts. The current study examines the effects of discourse signaling cues on Iranian EFL students' listening comprehension in academic lectures and also investigates the effect of tea...

We propose a statistical dialogue analysis model to determine discourse structures as well as speech acts using maximum entropy model. The model can automatically acquire probabilistic discourse knowledge from a discourse tagged corpus to resolve ambiguities. We propose the idea of tagging discourse segment boundaries to represent the structural information of discourse. Using this representati...

This paper is about the flow of inference between communicative intentions, discourse structure and the domain during discourse processing. We augment a theory of discourse interpretation with a theory of distinct mental attitudes and reasoning about them, in order to provide an account of how the attitudes interact with reasoning about discourse structure. INTRODUCTION The flow of inference be...

Despite showing an overtly simple structure, the semantic process in classic literary-narrative discourse conforms to complicated semiotic systems. As a result, semio-semantics is deemed as one of the most scientific, reliable tools since it helps intradiscursive semio-textual propositions be phenomenologically, and even epistemologically, analyzed. Consequently, the narrative discourse in “The...

We describe our initial efforts towards developing a large-scale corpus of Hindi texts annotated with discourse relations. Adopting the lexically grounded approach of the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), we present a preliminary analysis of discourse connectives in a small corpus. We describe how discourse connectives are represented in the sentence-level dependency annotation in Hindi, and disc...

Discourse relations between text segments can be explicitly marked using discourse connectors (e.g., because), but by far not all discourse relations are marked explicitly. However, people are usually able to infer the intended relation. What kinds of cues do people rely on? Could they in principle use structural cues from the preceding discourse to anticipate upcoming discourse relations? This...

Research in discourse processing has identi ed two representational requirements for discourse planning systems. First, discourse plans must adequately represent the intentional structure of the utterances they produce in order to enable a computational discourse agent to respond e ectively to communicative failures [15]. Second, discourse plans must represent the informational structure of utt...