We investigate the manual and automatic annotation of PDTB discourse relations in student essays, a novel domain that is not only learning-based and argumentative, but also noisy with surface errors and deeper coherency issues. We discuss methodological complexities it poses for the task. We present descriptive statistics and compare relation distributions in related corpora. We compare automat...

the field of elt is constantly witnessing the introduction of new instructional approaches: one such perhaps recent initiative is critical discourse analysis (cda). accordingly, the present study was an attempt to investigate the impact of cda instruction on iranian efl learners’ descriptive and argumentative writing ability. to fulfill the aforementioned purpose, a sample toefl was primarily p...

Given that more than 30% of healthcare costs are wasted on inappropriate care, suboptimal care is increasingly connected to the quality of medical decisions. It has been argued that personal decisions are the leading cause of death, and 80% of healthcare expenditures result from physicians' decisions. Therefore, improving healthcare necessitates improving medical decisions, ie, making decisions...

Spontaneous writing samples of deaf children with cochlear implants were analyzed for syntactic errors and other descriptive characteristics. These results were compared to a small sample of writings from hearing children.

We describe a novel and unique argumentative structure dataset. This corpus consists of data extracted from hundreds of Wikipedia articles using a meticulously monitored manual annotation process. The result is 2,683 argument elements, collected in the context of 33 controversial topics, organized under a simple claim-evidence structure. The obtained data are publicly available for academic res...