Null arguments and topics have been studied as two distinct phenomena, which are separately attributed to the discourse-oriented parameter and topic-prominent typology, respectively. As argued in Huang (1984), null arguments are allowed in languages like Korean, because they are discourse-recoverable, carrying old information. On the other hand, topics occur in the sentence-initial position in ...

This paper has three aims: (1) to generalize a computational account of the discourse process called CENTERING, (2) to apply this account to discourse processing in Japanese so that it can be used in computational systems for machine translation or language understanding, and (3) to provide some insights on the effect of syntactic factors in Japanese on discourse interpretation. We argue that w...

This study investigated prosodic realization of discourse topic by comparing professional and non-professional speakers’ production of four discourses. In each discourse, the target sentence, as the discourse topic, was either at the discourse initial position or at a non-initial position. Six professional and 20 non-professional speakers read aloud all the discourses with two repetitions. Exte...

This paper proposes a scheme of annotating spoken dialogues with discourse level information in terms of the discourse segment. Dialogues are coded with topic break index (TBI), which indicates the degree of topic break between the discourse segments, instead of marking a beginning and an ending utterances of the segment. TBI is graded by two levels, 1 and 2, and TBI=2 indicates a large change ...

This study investigates the relationship between prosody and information/discourse structure in spontaneous spoken folk tales in the tonal Mon-Khmer language Northern Kammu, a language that behaves as a typical phrase language where available boundary tones are enhanced to mark information structuring. Topic is always placed before Comment by syntactic movement if necessary. There is a prosodic...

This study describes and evaluates two essay-based discourse analysis systems that identify thesis and conclusion statements from student essays written on six different essay topics. Essays used to train and evaluate the systems were annotated by two human judges, according to a discourse annotation protocol. Using a machine learning approach, a number of discourse-related features were automa...

In this paper, we describe novel methods for topic segmentation based on patterns of discourse organization. Using a corpus of news texts, our results show that it is possible to use discourse features (based on Rhetorical Structure Theory) for topic segmentation and that we outperform some well-known methods.

A topic or a theme is what discourse, a discourse fragment or a sentence is about. It is the shortest summary of a discourse, the main proposition of a paragraph or what is commented on in a sentence. The term topic is usually defined as the aboutness of a unit of discourse [20]. Topic structure within a text can be tackled from two different points of view: from a Document Level (discourse top...

The salience of an entity in the discourse is correlated with the type of referring expression that speakers use to refer to that entity. Speakers tend to use pronouns to refer to salient entities, whereas they use lexical noun phrases to refer to less salient entities. We propose a novel approach to formalize the interaction between salience and choices of referring expressions using topic mod...

Topic Maps is a standards-based technology and model for organizing and integrating digital information in a range of applications and domains. Drawing on notions adapted from current discourse theory, this article focuses on the communicative, or explanatory, potential of topic maps. It is demonstrated that topic maps may be structured in ways that are “text-like” in character and, therefore, ...