Understanding the structure of scientific discourse is of paramount importance for the development of appropriate Natural Language Processing tools able to extract and summarize information from research articles. In this paper we present an annotated corpus of scientific discourse in the domain of Computer Graphics. We describe the way we built our corpus by designing an annotation schema and ...

The use of discourse structure was shown to be effective in various applications. Meta-discourse is often used as an expression to signal discourse structure. Previous work focused on using the meta-discourse structure in written texts, or spoken material in very clean conditions. This paper presents a metadiscourse annotated corpus in a more challenging educational context. The corpus comprise...

Explanation and argumentation are fundamental to reasoning. They are therefore of some importance to artificial intelligence. Discourse-based reasoning (DBR) is a knowledge representation technology that uses natural patterns of discourse as a basis for a structural ontology of explanatory and argumentative reasoning. By this means, we may ontologize the reasoning process itself, thus rendering...

Social media provides a unique platform enabling public discourse around cross-cutting ideologies. In this paper, we provide a methodological lens for studying the discourses around the controversial topic of abortion on social media. Drawing from the theoretical framework of “Critical Discourse Analysis”, we study discourse around abortion on Twitter through analysis of language and the manife...

Studies in developmental literature claim that for young children context plays a more important role than literal meaning in comprehending a speaker's communicative intention. The present study evaluates this claim for different categories of context in children aged 3 to 7 years. In particular, we analyze contexts pertaining to the categories we define as follows: Access, Space, Time, Discour...

This study reports a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the use of discourse markers (DMs) in personal narrative and argumentative papers written by 30 undergraduate students: 15 native speakers (NS) and 15 nonnative speakers (NNS). The study also ascertains whether the frequency and the incorrect use of DMs plays a role in determining the quality of ESL writings. Findings showed that the...