Linguists, including computational linguists, have always been fond of talking about trees. In this paper, we outline a theory of linguistic structure which talks about talking about trees; we call this theory Description theory (D-theory). While important issues must be resolved before a complete picture of D-theory emerges (and also before we can build programs which utilize it), we believe t...

silence is one of the most important elements in mystical theology, generally, and in negative theology, particularly. silence is the last stage to which the mystic or the mystical theologian reaches in talking of god. in this stage, all the linguistic methods of the mystic disappear. in this paper, firstly, we will discuss the central role of the silence in the rumi’s works. then we will argue...

This paper presents the results of a study comparing the use of auditory icons, earcons and speech in an audio only interface for a digital talking book player. The different techniques were evaluated according to the identification errors made, and subjective measures of understandability, intrusiveness and pleasurability. Results suggest the use of auditory icons combined with speech whenever...

Our aim in this note is to make some conjectures about extremal densities of daisy-free families, where a ‘daisy’ is a certain hypergraph. These questions turn out to be related to some Turán problems in the hypercube, but they are also natural in their own right. We start by giving the daisy conjectures, and some related problems, and shall then go on to describe the connection with vertex-Tur...

The CoNLL-2015 shared task focuses on shallow discourse parsing, which takes a piece of newswire text as input and returns the discourse relations in a PDTB style. In this paper, we describe our discourse parser that participated in the shared task. We use 9 components to construct the whole parser to identify discourse connectives, label arguments and classify the sense of Explicit or Non-Expl...

Predicting the structure of a discourse is challenging because relations between discourse segments are often implicit and thus hard to distinguish computationally. I extend previous work to classify implicit discourse relations by introducing a novel set of features on the level of semantic roles. My results demonstrate that such features are helpful, yielding results competitive with other fe...