Given the prevalence of the use of rhetorical relations in the generation of text (Itovy, 1989; Moore and Paris, 1988; Scott and Souza, 1990), it is surprising how little work has actually been done on the grammatical realization of these relations. Most systems, based on Mann and Thompson's formulation of Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988), have adopted simplified solutions ...

In previous work we argued that cinematic language may provide insights into the construction of narrative coherence in hypertext, and we identified in the shot juxtaposition of rhetorical patterns the source of coherence for cinematic discourse. Here we deepen our analysis, to show how the mechanisms that underpin cinematic rhetorical patterns are the same as those providing coherence in writt...

The paper deals with the cohesion part of a model of global discourse interpretation, usually known as Veins Theory (VT). By taking from the Rhetorical Structure Theory the notions of nuclearity and relations, but ignoring the relations’ names, VT computes from rhetorical structures strings of discourse units, called veins, from which domains of accessibility can be determined for each discours...

In the current study we aim at exploiting discourse structure of Arabic text to automatically finding answers to non-factoid questions ("Why" and "How to"). Our method is based on Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) that many studies have shown to be a very effective approach for many computational linguistics applications such as (text generation, text summarization and machine translation). For...

In this paper, we discuss dependencies between rhetorical discourse structure and relevance implicatures. We follow [3] and infer relevance implicatures from the assumption that an answer provides optimal information for solving an explicitly or implicitly given decision problem of the inquirer. Such a decision problem can be identified with a question raised in the conversation. Background que...

Scott and Souza have posed the problem of how a rhetorical structure in which proposi tions are linked by rhetorical relations but not yet arranged in a linear order can be realized by a text structure in which propositions are ordered and linked up by appropriate discourse connectives Almost all work on this problem assumes implicitly or explicitly that this map ping is governed by a constrain...

This paper addresses discourse structure from the perspective of understanding. It would perhaps help us understand the na,ture of discourse relatiolls il" we better understood what units of a text. can be related to one a.nother. In Olle ma.jor theory of discourse structure, Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann &: Thompson 1988; Imrea.l'ter simply RS'T), the smallest possible linguistic units tha...

Both rhetorical structure and punctuation have been helpful in discourse processing. Based on a corpus annotation project, this paper reports the discursive usage of 6 Chinese punctuation marks in news commentary texts: Colon, Dash, Ellipsis, Exclamation Mark, Question Mark, and Semicolon. The rhetorical patterns of these marks are compared against patterns around cue phrases in general. Result...

Usually, human-computer dialogue systems rely on ad-hoc solutions for the component performing speech turn generation, in natural language. However, integration of taskspecific and general world knowledge in order to provide a more reliable and natural interaction with humans also through more sophisticated language generation techniques becomes needed. In this paper we present performance impr...

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...