It is generally accepted that a discourse connective expresses a semantic and/or pragmatic relation between its matrix sentence or clause and something in the previous discourse. Usually the sense of this relation is expressed as a label, often within a hierarchy of sense labels. But the meaning of these labels may vary from system to system, and the same connective may be assigned different la...

the notion of genre has received a great deal of attention both in discourse analytic studies as well as in the field of esp/eap course design. the present paper has attempted to use genre analysis to account for the rhetorical features of research article introductions written by iranian academics in two disciplinary fields of education and economics. the corpus comprised 40 research article i...

This paper summarizes work over the past ve years on the automated planning and generation of multisentence texts using discourse structure relations, placing it in context of ongoing eeorts by Computational Linguists and Linguists to understand the structure of discourse. Based on a series of studies by the author and others, the paper describes how the orientation of generation toward communi...

I this article we argue that discourse structure constrains the set of possible constituents in a discourse that can provide the relevant context for structuring information in a target sentence, while information structure critically constrains discourse structure ambiguity. For the speaker, the discourse structure provides a set of possible contexts for continuation while information structur...

The present research addressed the prosodic realization of global and local text structure and content in the spoken discourse data produced by Persian EFL learners. Two newspaper articles were analyzed using Rhetorical Structure Theory. Based on these analyses, the global structure in terms of hierarchical level, the local structure in terms of the relative importance of text segments and the ...

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...

In this paper we study the utility of discourse structure for spoken dialogue performance modeling. We experiment with various ways of exploiting the discourse structure: in isolation, as context information for other factors (correctness and certainty) and through trajectories in the discourse structure hierarchy. Our correlation and PARADISE results show that, while the discourse structure is...

We argue in this paper that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within discourse structure, instead work anaphorically to contribute relational meaning, with only indirect dependence on discourse structure. This allows a simpler discourse structure to provide scaffolding for compositional semantics, and reveals multi...

The paper addresses the relation between several dimensions along which discourse has been assumed to be structured – topical structure, hierarchical structure, QUD-structure and thematic structure – and points at previously undescribed mismatches between those. BACKGROUND ASSUMPTIONS: As discourse progresses, the aboutness topic of a sentence (Reinhart, 1981; Roberts, 2011; Krifka, 2007) may r...