The idea of contrast plays an important role in the analysis of information structure and discourse structure. In the literature on information structure, we encounter the concept of contrastive focus and of contrastive topic, and there is also the opinion that focus in general establishes a contrast. In the literature on discourse structure, it is commonly held that there is a discourse relati...

We discuss and evaluate a new annotation scheme and discourse-analytic method, the QUD-tree framework. We present an annotation study, in which the framework, based on the concept of Questions under Discussion, is applied to English and German interview data, using TreeAnno, an annotation tool specially developed for this new kind of discourse annotation. The results of an inter-annotator agree...

We describe a generic set of tools for representing, annotating, and analyzing multi-party discourse, including: an ontology of multimodal discourse, a programming interface for that ontology, and NOMOS – a flexible and extensible toolkit for browsing and annotating discourse. We describe applications built using the NOMOS framework to facilitate a real annotation task, as well as for visualizi...

SWAN/SIOC is an alignment of two Web ontologies that, taken together, represent Scientific Discourse in online communities at different levels of granularity (content items and discourse elements). The goal of this alignment is to make the discourse structure and component relationships much more accessible to computation, so that information can be navigated, compared and understood in a conte...

• Temporal discourse markers such as after, before or while are commonly described as triggers for discourse relations expressing a temporal relation (Mann and Thompson, 1987; Knott, 1996). However, only little research has been done regarding the interaction of such discourse markers with the context within a multi-sentence discourse. Lascarides & Oberlander (1993), for instance, note that sen...

At present, automatic discourse analysis is a relevant research topic in the field of NLP. However, discourse is one of the phenomena most difficult to process. Although discourse parsers have been already developed for several languages, this tool does not exist for Catalan. In order to implement this kind of parser, the first step is to develop a discourse segmenter. In this article we presen...

The topic of this paper is Audio Description (AD) for blind and partially sighted people. I will outline a discourse-based approach to AD focussing on the role of mental modelling, local and global coherence, and different types of inferences (explicatures and implicatures). Applying these concepts to AD, I will discuss initial insights and outline questions for empirical research. My main aim ...

We present a discourse model integrated with a case-based reasoning dialogue system which learns from experience. The discourse model is capable of solving references, manage sub dialogues and respect the current topic in a dialogue in natural language. The framework is flexible enough not to disturb the learning functions, but allows dynamic changes to a large extent. The system is tested in a...

The automatic identification of direct and indirect discourses is a topic not yet explored in Natural Language Processing. We developed the DID system that when applied to children stories identifies the discourses, relative to the narrator (indirect discourse) or to the characters taking part in the story (direct discourse). This automation can be advantageous, namely when it is necessary to t...

Polarizing discussions on political and social issues are common in mass and user-generated media. However, computer-based understanding of ideological discourse has been considered too difficult to undertake. In this paper we propose a statistical model for ideology discourse. By ideology we mean “a set of general beliefs socially shared by a group of people.” For example, Democratic and Repub...