In this thesis I have addressed the problem of text summarization from a linguistic perspective. After reviewing some work in the area, I have found that many satisfactory approaches to text summarization rely on general properties of language that are reflected in the surface realization of texts. The main claim of this thesis is that some general properties of the discursive organization of t...

This paper describes how discursive knowledge, given by the discursive theories RST (Rhetorical Structure Theory) and CST (Crossdocument Structure Theory), may improve the automatic evaluation of local coherence in multi-document summaries. Two of the main coherence models from literature were incremented with discursive information and obtained 91.3% of accuracy, with a gain of 53% in relation...

This article offers a critical assessment of Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory of democracy. It suggests that the main thrust of a discursive account of legitimacy is the attempt to show how the demands of maximal democratic inclusion might be reconciled with a politics of reasoned agreements. While this aim is endorsed, the thrust of the argument is that a critical theory of democracy require...

This article argues that a discursive–sociological approach to study Europeanization is particularly apt for understanding the dynamics of policy change in Europe. It does so by bringing closer the agenda of discursive institutionalism (DI) and gender policy analysis, drawing upon the recent sociological and discursive turns in the study of the domestic impact of Europe, and the long-term inter...

Background: Healthcare delivery is largely accomplished in and through conversations between people, and healthcare quality and effectiveness depend enormously upon the communication practices employed within these conversations. An important body of evidence about these practices has been generated by conversation analysis and related discourse analytic approaches, but there has been very litt...

BACKGROUND Healthcare delivery is largely accomplished in and through conversations between people, and healthcare quality and effectiveness depend enormously upon the communication practices employed within these conversations. An important body of evidence about these practices has been generated by conversation analysis and related discourse analytic approaches, but there has been very littl...

Towards Preference Extraction From Negotiation Dialogues This paper presents an NLP based approach for preference expression extraction from negotiation dialogues. We propose a new annotation schema for preferences and dependencies among them and illustrate on two different corpus genres. We then suggest a learning approach that efficiently extracts preference expressions using a combination of...

This article outlines one tradition of qualitative research in social psychology, that of discourse analysis and discursive research. It proposes that the tradition offers an alternative conceptualisation of a psychosocial subject to accounts which draw on psychoanalytic theorising. The article reviews some of the problems around conceptualising a subject in discursive terms, then sets out some...