This article describes a contrastive study on rhetorical differences between Italian and English sales promotion letters. It is assumed that cultural differences affect discourse genres traditionally considered as standardized, ritual or even formulaic, written business communication being a case in point. It was our goal to investigate how information is presented and what rhetorical strategie...

We present a shift-reduce rhetorical parsing algorithm that learns to construct rhetorical structures of texts from a corpus of discourse-parse action sequences. The algorithm exploits robust lexical, syntactic, and semantic knowledge sources.

The University of Winnipeg’s Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications has the distinction of being the first independent writing program in Canada. Conceived in 1986 as The Writing Program, it underwent a review in 1993, separated from the English Department to become the Centre for Academic Writing, and then began offering a communications program in partnership with a local college...

We describe our experimental rhetoric engine Vox Populi that generates biased video-sequences from a repository of video interviews and other related audio-visual web sources. Users are thus able to explore their own opinions on controversial topics covered by the repository. The repository contains interviews with United States residents stating their opinion on the events occurring after the ...

Psych-verbs are a relatively well-studied phenomenon in theoretical linguistics (Belleti and Rizzi (1988), Grimshaw (1990), etc.), but one for which as yet no truly satisfactory analysis has been developed. This paper seeks to provide a new perspective on the semantics of psych-verbs by bringing ideas based on Asher and Pustejovsky (2000) into the discussion, namely, that the concept of rhetori...

This paper presents a study in sentiment analysis which exploits information of the relational discourse structure in a Basque corpus consisting of literature reviews. The QWN-PPV method was employed to label all the texts at element level and the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) was used to extract discourse structure information. The preliminary results show that discourse structure is effec...

We present a new, data-driven approach to text planning, which can be used not only to map full knowledge pools into natural language texts, but also to generate texts that satisfy multiple, high-level communicative goals. The approach explains how global coherence can be achieved by exploiting the local coherence constraints of rhetorical relations. The local constraints were derived from a co...

Economists included knowledge their models to improve their explanatory accuracy. A major step was to describe the production of knowledge as well as its exploitation as an internal part of economic models. Politicians prefer to talk about a new kind of economy so they can sustain the myth of progress. Rather than explain economies using a new model they try to leave economic history intact whi...

We describe the task of intention-based text understanding for scientific argumentation. The model of scientific argumentation presented here is based on the recognition of 28 concrete rhetorical moves in text. These moves can in turn be associated with higherlevel intentions. The intentions we aim to model operate in the limited domain of scientific argumentation and justification; it is the l...

Annotation efforts have resulted in the availability of a number of corpora with rhetorical relation information. The corpora, unfortunately, are annotated under different theoretical approaches and have different hierarchies of relations. In addition, new sets of rhetorical relations have been proposed to account for language variation. The types of relations, however, tend to overlap or be re...