We present in this paper the development of a specialized comparable corpora compilation tool, for which quality would be close to a manually compiled corpus. The comparability is based on three levels: domain, topic and type of discourse. Domain and topic can be filtered with the keywords used through web search. But the detection of the type of discourse needs a wide linguistic analysis. The ...

Adopting Vallduvı́’s partition of the background into link and tail, I provide an account for Italian data. Being links pre-focal expressions, and tails post-focal, right dislocated expressions, I claim that links are shifting topics, while tails are discourse-given material. I show that a link is not iterated in discourse as long as the topic does not shift. If a link appears to refer to the cu...

This volume addresses the topic of “new frontiers in resilient aging,” which is of ever-increasing significance in current gerontological and geriatric discourse and research. The topic is not only very complex, but has enormous scope and breadth, encompassing a number of psychosocial and biological models of aging, theoretical formulations, definitions, and dimensions of resilience, and the co...

We investigated the influence of sentence elaboration on self-regulated learning in order to examine age differences in resource allocation to the construction of textbase and discourse-level representations. Older and younger adults learned about a topic by reading a series of sentences varying in elaboration (from simple factoids to highly elaborated text) and manner of presentation (progress...

This paper reports an experimental investigation of the prosodic encoding of topic and focus in Mandarin by examining disyllabic subject nouns elicited in four discourse contexts. These subject nouns also varied in terms of their tonal composition as well as the length of their embedding sentences. The central questions addressed are how prosodic effects of topic and focus differ from each othe...

In this paper, we describe a method of automatically generating summary slides from a text. The slides are generated by itemizing topic/non-topic parts that are extracted from the text based on syntactic/case analysis. The indentations of the items are controlled according to the discourse structure, which is detected by cue phrases, identification of word chain and similarity between two sente...

In this article a clustering algorithm, allowing the automatic detection of speakers’ register changes, is presented. Together with automatic detection of pause duration, it has shown to be efficient for the automatic detection and prediction of topic changes. The need to take into account other parameters such as tempo and intensity, in the framework of Linear Discriminant Analysis, is propose...

Most linguists concerned with cohesion have focused on the linear relations between sentences. This study is an attempt to extend the notion of cohesion beyond the sentence level, by viewing it as a requirement of the text for connectedness between segments larger than a sentence, such as paragraphs or whole chapters. Of the various concatenation devices listed in Danes( 1974), the most element...