Quantifiers are ubiquitous in natural language and, in addition to providing information about quantity, they serve important discourse functions. We outline several theoretical accounts of the functions that quantifiers perform in a discourse and the factors governing their interpretation, focusing on two specific topics that have received substantial attention from researchers working in ling...

Languages vary in the ways in which they express various notions of discourse prominence, such as topic, focus, and point of view. In the Algonquian language family, such notions are grammaticalized via two morphosyntactic mechanisms: obviation and direct/inverse. Obviation and direct/inverse are typically conceived of as working together as a single concerted system, both marking the same type...

Applied discourse analysis is a hot topic in Information Retrieval (IR) and the related field of Information Extraction (IE). Although interesting observations about discourse can be made "by hand," applications require large quantities of data about language data which is rather uninteresting. This paper investigates using statistical analysis over a body of text to suggest new rules for recog...

A discourse typically involves numerous entities, but few are mentioned more than once. Distinguishing discourse entities that die out after just one mention (singletons) from those that lead longer lives (coreferent) would benefit NLP applications such as coreference resolution, protagonist identification, topic modeling, and discourse coherence. We build a logistic regression model for predic...

BACKGROUND Dread Pirate Roberts, founder of the first cryptomarket for illicit drugs named Silk Road, articulated libertarian political motives for his ventures. Previous research argues that there is a significant political component present or involved in cryptomarket drug dealing which is specifically libertarian. The aim of the paper is to investigate the prevalence of political discourses ...

This paper contributes to the limited body of empirical research in the domain of discourse structure of information seeking queries. We describe the development of an annotation schema for coding topic development in information seeking queries and the initial observations from a pilot sample of query sessions. The main idea that we explore is the relationship between constant and variable dis...

Polarizing opinions about political and social controversies take place commonly in mass and more recently user-generated media. A functional democratic society builds on civic discussions among people holding different beliefs on an issue. However, so far, few computer technologies have been devoted to facilitate mutual understanding, and arguably could have worsened the situation. We envision...

The use of discourse structure was shown to be effective in various applications. Meta-discourse is often used as an expression to signal discourse structure. Previous work focused on using the meta-discourse structure in written texts, or spoken material in very clean conditions. This paper presents a metadiscourse annotated corpus in a more challenging educational context. The corpus comprise...

Although the language we encounter is typically embedded in rich discourse contexts, many existing models of processing focus largely on phenomena that occur sentence internally. Similarly, most work on children’s language learning does not consider how information can accumulate as a discourse progresses. Research in pragmatics, however, points to ways in which each subsequent utterance provid...

The width and the position of the pitch range reveals important information about the structure of a spoken discourse. This paper studies the correlation between the pitch range and the discourse structure based on a large database. The model used to analyze the discourse is based on a two-level description of registers. Primary register features reflect the prosodic phrasing within a discourse...