This study aims at retrieving tweets with an implicit topic, which cannot be identified by the current query-matching system employed by Twitter. Such tweets are relevant to a given query but do not explicitly contain the term. When these tweets are combined with a relevant tweet containing the overt keyword, the “serialized” tweets can be integrated into the same discourse context. To this end...

The work presented in this paper attempts to evaluate and quantify the use of discourse relations in the context of blog summarization and compare their use to more traditional and factual texts. Specifically, we measured the usefulness of 6 discourse relations namely comparison, contingency, illustration, attribution, topic-opinion, and attributive for the task of text summarization from blogs...

The paper presents a corpus-based information-structural analysis of the German discourse particles aber and auch in the so-called post-initial position, i.e. between the pre-field constituent and the finite verb in main clauses. Based on corpus data, I argue that aber and auch in this position mark the boundary between the focus and the background of the sentence that hosts them. By doing this...

This study investigated the relationship between discourse deficits to a broader range of other symptoms in 57 children with autism. We hypothesized that autism symptomatology, as measured by the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS), would be related to the children's difficulty in maintaining an ongoing topic of discourse. Children provided a natural language sample while interacting ...

Previous plon-based models of dialogue understanding hove been unoble to occount for mony types of subdiologues present in noturolly occurring conversotions. One reason for this is that the models hove not clearly differentiated between the voroius woys thot on utterance con relote to a plan structure representing o topic. In this poper we present a plon-bosed theory that allows o wide variety ...

This paper reported an acoustic experiment examining the effect of topic structure and syntax on boundary pitch parameters. Simple discourses containing three sentences in Standard Chinese were constructed and the boundary between the first sentence and the second sentence of each discourse varied along the following parameters: (a) topic internal, clause, (b) topic shift, clause, (c) topic int...

One of the central issues in the study of discourse anaphora is concerned with the problem of anaphoric distribution in discourse, namely how to account for the choice of a particular referential/anaphoric form at a particular point in discourse. Needless to say, anaphoric distribution in discourse is a very complex phenomenon, involving, among other things, structural, cognitive and pragmatic ...

This paper proposes a new approach to discourse directionality, a phenomenon which, as is well known, is neither well defined nor adequately accounted for. Directionality is the property of (a part of) a discourse to be directed towards a 'goal', usually implying asymmetric functional relations between the discourse units involved. The direction of such an asymmetric discourse relation depends ...

The observation that discourse is more than a mere sequence of utterances or sentences amounts to a truism. But what follows from this? In what way does the ”value added” arise when segments of discourse are juxtaposed how does hierarchical structure originate from a linearized discourse? While many discourse phenomena apply to dialogue and monologue alike, this tutorial will center its attenti...

The timing of F0 peaks in accented syllables is known to be subject to a number of segmental and prosodic constraints. The experiment reported here was carried out to investigate the additional effect of topic structure on F0 peak timing. Three specially constructed English texts were read aloud by nine subjects. In the texts, each of four accented target syllables occurred in different discour...