In recent times, there has been an increase in the number of Natural Language Generation systems that take into consideration a user's inferences. The statements generated by these systems are typically connected by inferential links, which are opportunistic in nature. In this paper, we describe a discourse structuring mechanism which organizes inferentially linked statements as well as stateme...

In this paper we classify the temporal relations between pairs of events on an article-wide basis. This is in contrast to much of the existing literature which focuses on just event pairs which are found within the same or adjacent sentences. To achieve this, we leverage on discourse analysis as we believe that it provides more useful semantic information than typical lexico-syntactic features....

Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988, Taboada and Mann, 2006) postulates that a coherent text can be characterized by means of a tree structure whose leaves are the “elementary discourse units” (henceforth: EDUs), and whose internal nodes are labelled with a coherence relation. The theory proposes a list of about 25 such relations, which may be said to hold between two EDUs or (...

This paper shows how the disambiguation of discourse connectives can improve their automatic translation, while preserving the overall performance of statistical MT as measured by BLEU. State-of-the-art automatic classifiers for rhetorical relations are used prior to MT to label discourse connectives that signal those relations. These labels are used for MT in two ways: (1) by augmenting factor...

Based on experiences using the ISO standard for dialogue act annotation (ISO 24617-2:2012), this paper proposes to correct certain deficiencies in the standard, and discusses some extensions that would increase the standard usefulness and usability. More specifically, it is suggested to add the annotation of non-functional segments that are relevant for the accurate annotation of some feedback ...

In recent times, there has been an increase in the number of Natural Language Generation systems that take into consideration a user’s inferences. The statements generated by these systems are typically connected by inferential links, which are opportunistic in nature. In this paper, we describe a discourse structuring mechanism which organizes inferentially linked statements as well as stateme...

The Japanese infinitive-clause construction (InfCx) and gerund-clause construction (GerCx) may convey a wide range of interclausal semantic relations, including ‘temporal sequence’, ‘cause’, and ‘manner’, largely due to pragmatic enrichment. This work addresses the question of what the core meaning(s) of the two constructions is (are), and demonstrates (i) that the InfCx and GerCx indicate eith...

This paper presents the integration of cohesive properties of text with coherence relations, to obtain an adequate representation of text for automatic summarization. A summarizer based on Lexical Chains is enchanced with rhetorical and argumentative structure obtained via Discourse Markers. When evaluated with newspaper corpus, this integration yields only slight improvement in the resulting s...

With the advancement of technology and the wide adoption of ontologies as knowledge representation formats, in the last decade, a handful of models were proposed for the externalization of the rhetoric and argumentation captured within scientific publications. Conceptually, most of these models share a similar representation form of the scientific publication, i.e. as a series of interconnected...

Past research is not clear on the process by which rhetorical questions influence persuasion (i.e., increased focus on message arguments vs. on the persuasion agent). Based on recent theories of persuasion knowledge and rhetorical figures in advertising, our model delineates conditions under which rhetoricals are likely to enhance argument elaboration (low salience of the rhetorical) and those ...