extended abstract 1. introduction iran's islamic revolution that was initially started after the coup of 1932 (1955 ad), during the 25 years until 1979, in terms of formation, persistence, and practical and ideological leadership took a direction that major revolutions of 19th and 20th centuries fail to take. these revolutions believed that any change out of their framework was simply impossibl...

The purpose of this article is to compare three qualitative approaches that can be used in health research: phenomenology, discourse analysis, and grounded theory. The authors include a model that summarizes similarities and differences among the approaches, with attention to their historical development, goals, methods, audience, and products. They then illustrate how these approaches differ b...

Recent theories of focusing and reference rely crucially on discourse structure to constrain the availability of discourse entities for reference, but deriving the structure of an arbitrary discourse has proved to be a significant problem. A useful level of problem reduction may be achieved by analyzing discourse in which the structure is explicit, rather than implicit. In this paper we conside...

In order to analyze, generate and use documents containing both text and graphics, it is important to have a theory of their structure. We argue that it is possible to develop a semantics for graphics, as well as text, and generate an integrated representation of text/graphics discourse, building on previous theories of text discourse. A major component of our theory is an integrated natural la...

Humans process language word by word and construct partial linguistic structures on the fly before the end of the sentence is perceived. Inspired by this cognitive ability, incremental algorithms for natural language processing tasks have been proposed and demonstrated promising performance. For discourse relation (DR) parsing, however, it is not yet clear to what extent humans can recognize DR...

This paper is concerned with the robust analysis of the discourse structure of a text via underspecification. Most current discourse theories (e.g. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) by Mann and Thompson (1988), Abduction by Hobbs et al. (1993) or Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) by Asher (1993)) require detailed world and context knowledge for the derivation of the discourse str...

An assumption shared by many theories of discourse is that discourse structure constrains anaphora resolution (cf. Grosz and Sidner 1986] for deenite NPs, Lascarides and Asher 1991], Nakhimovsky 1988] for temporal anaphora, Webber 1990] for deictic pronouns and Gardent 1991], Pr ust and Scha 1990] for VP ellipsis). The aim of this paper is (i) to show that this assumption also applies to multip...

Natural language generation is a knowledge-intensive, goal-directed process involving many interacting choices. Some questions that a generation system must answer include: what information needs to be included in the output to satisfy the speaker's or writer's communicative goals? how should a discourse contribution be structured to ensure its coherence? which modalities should be used to maxi...