This paper provides a corpus-based generic characterization of appointment-scheduling dialogues—a type of task-oriented conversation—by concentrating on the rhetorical and thematic choices made by the speakers that produce them. The analytical tools used for this study are Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), the notion of Theme as defined in Systemic Functional Linguistics, and Thematic Progress...

In this paper, we offer a novel method for processing given information in discourse, paying particular attention to definite descriptions. We argue that extant theories don’t do justice to the complexity of interaction between the knowledge resources that are used. In line with Hobbs (1979), we claim that discourse structure—as defined by the rhetorical connections between the propositions int...

contrastive rhetorical analysis as a way of understanding different ways through which writers from various cultural backgrounds shape their discourse was officially initiated by the works of kaplan (1966). this study tries to use the methodology to investigate the news reports in two american and iranian widely published newspapers. using the analytical methodologies of contrastive rhetoric an...

While quite a few linguistic corpora with syntactic annotations are available today, resources are scarce on the level of discourse annotation. A flexible, extendible annotation format speeds up development. We therefore propose an XML format for annotating rhetorical structure trees. In human and automatic analysis, rhetorical structure is often difficult and assigned incrementally. Thus, the ...

This paper introduces the first Basque discourse TreeBank annotated with rhetorical relations following Rhetorical Structure Theory. We report the main features of the corpus, such as the annotation criteria, inter-annotator agreement and harmonization procedure. We describe an online search system to check the annotation of discourse relations.

We derive the rhetorical structures of texts by means of two new, surface-form-based algorithms: one that identifies discourse usages of cue phrases and breaks sentences into clauses, and one that produces valid rhetorical structure trees for unrestricted natural language texts. The algorithms use information that was derived from a corpus analysis of cue phrases.

Discourse structure is the hidden link between surface features and document-level properties, such as sentiment polarity. We show that the discourse analyses produced by Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) parsers can improve document-level sentiment analysis, via composition of local information up the discourse tree. First, we show that reweighting discourse units according to their position i...

A viable model of interactive discourse must explain how interlocutors share conversational control to construct the discourse, and recognize the contributions of others to it. The position that I take in this paper is from a narrower perspective, one in which there is a primary speaker who controls and directs the discourse, but that does so while trying to accommodate the informational needs ...

The Text2Dialogue (T2D) system that we are developing allows digital content creators to generate attractive multi-modal dialogues presented by two virtual agents—by simply providing textual information as input. We use Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to decompose text into segments and to identify rhetorical discourse relations between them. These are then “acted out” by two 3D agents using ...

In this paper we consider sentences that contain Multiple In-text References (MIR) and their position in the rhetorical structure of articles. We carry out the analysis of MIR in a large scale dataset of about 80,000 research articles published by the Public Library of Science in 7 journals. We analyze two major characteristics of MIR: their positions in the IMRaD structure of articles, and the...