This study examined the effect of two different authentic topic-familiar rhetorical L2 listening tasks (expository and argumentative) differing in reasoning demand on the listening comprehension scores of a number of Iranian EFL advanced learners. Sixty homogeneous advanced learners were recruited based on their performance on an English Language Proficiency test (Fowler & Coe, 1976). Then they...

A question may be asked not only to elicit information, but also to make a statement. Questions serving the latter purpose, called rhetorical questions, are often lexically and syntactically indistinguishable from other types of questions. Still, it is desirable to be able to identify rhetorical questions, as it is relevant for many NLP tasks, including information extraction and text summariza...

Rhetorical structure analysis (RSA) explores discourse relations among elementary discourse units (EDUs) in a text. It is very useful in many text processing tasks employing relationships among EDUs such as text understanding, summarization, and question-answering. Thai language with its distinctive linguistic characteristics requires a unique technique. This article proposes an approach for Th...

In this article, we present the on-line interface that we have developed for the RST Spanish Treebank, the first corpus including Spanish texts annotated with rhetorical relations. This interface allows users to consult or download the texts and their corresponding annotations. In addition, it allows carrying out several tasks over a selected subcorpus: searching statistics in terms of words, r...

This work aims to explore the correlation between the discourse structure of a spoken monologue and its prosody by predicting discourse relations from different prosodic attributes. For this purpose, a corpus of semi-spontaneous monologues in English has been automatically annotated according to the Rhetorical Structure Theory, which models coherence in text via rhetorical relations. From corre...

In this position paper, we argue Ibr the need for a generation system to represent communicative goals (i.e., goals that express the speaker's intent to aflect the bearer's mental attitudes), at least if certain tasks are to be achieved. We lurther argue that, wlfile rhetorical relations might be recoverable t tom other Iactors, they appear to be a useful level of abstraction to maintain about ...

We present the results of several machine learning tasks designed to predict rhetorical relations that hold between clauses in discourse. We demonstrate that organizing rhetorical relations into different granularity categories (based on relative degree of detail) increases average prediction accuracy from 58% to 70%. Accuracy further increases to 80% with the inclusion of clause types. These r...

OBJECTIVE: The prior knowledge about the rhetorical structure of scientific abstracts is useful for various text-mining tasks such as information extraction, information retrieval, and automatic summarization. This paper presents a novel approach to categorize sentences in scientific abstracts into four sections, objective, methods, results, and conclusions. METHOD: Formalizing the categorizati...

This paper describes a pedagogical agent that helps children to learn to author structured presentations about explanations of concepts. Using a Rhetorical Structure Theory analysis of a source Web page, the agent performs pedagogical tasks to support the user's understanding of rhetorical relations, stimulates reflection about the relations between the structure of the original text and the st...

We present the results of several machine learning tasks that exploit explicit spatial language to classify rhetorical relations and the spatial information of narrative events. Three corpora are annotated with figure and ground (granularity) relationships, mereotopologically classified verbs and prepositions, and frames of reference. For rhetorical relations, Naı̈ve Bayesian models achieve 84.9...