Current approaches to recognizing discourse relations rely on a combination of shallow, surfacebased features (e.g., bigrams, word pairs), and rather specialized hand-crafted features. As a way to avoid both the shallowness of word-based representations and the lack of coverage of specialized linguistic features, we use a graph-based representation of discourse segments, which allows for a more...

This paper proposes a research methodology for attacking the problem of providing fluent and natural discourse about space and spatially situated tasks between naïve users and robots. We suggest flexible and adaptive ontology mediation, parameterized according to empirically determined discourse and contextual factors, as a suitable architecture with clear applications for the treatment of natu...

We examined the relations between verbal communication disturbances and several hypothesized etiological factors in 47 schizophrenia spectrum individuals. Both alogia and disturbed discourse coherence were associated with poor planning abilities. Alogia and discourse coherence were differentially associated with performance on tasks measuring fluency, working memory, word finding abilities, and...

Research on the factors and processes involved in pronoun interpretation has to date concentrated on anaphoric pronouns. Results have supported the now widely-held view that discourse understanding involves the creation of a partial, mental model of the situation described through the discourse. Anaphoric pronouns are taken to refer to elements of that model (often called discourse referents or...

Discourse relations are a bridge between sentence-level semantics and discourselevel semantics. They can be signalled explicitly with discourse connectives or conveyed implicitly, to be inferred by a comprehender. The same discourse units can be related in more than one way, signalled by multiple connectives. But multiple connectives aren’t necessary: Multiple relations can be conveyed even whe...

Prominence variation is known to be determined in part by discourse factors, such as the givenness or newness of the discourse entity being realized to the discourse. However, few empirical studies have been carried out to explain a wider range of phenomena occurring in natural speech corpora. In this study, corpus linguistics methods are applied to a task-oriented monologue corpus to show that...

To understand a discourse the reader needs to recover the relations between the discourse elements as intended by the writer Writers can and very often do help the reader along by providing explicit lexical signals of the intended discourse relations through the use of lexicalised discourse markers In this paper we present a novel approach for generating texts containing multiple embedded rheto...

To understand a discourse, the reader needs to recover the relations between the discourse elements as intended by the writer. Writers can, and very often do, help the reader along by providing explicit lexical signals of the intended discourse relations through the use of lexicalised discourse markers. In this paper we present a novel approach for generating texts containing multiple, embedded...

........................................................................................ 8 CHAPTER ....................................................................................... 1 11 ..................................................................... 1.1 Rationale and background 12 ................................................................... 1.1.1 The virtual workplace 12 .......