This paper surveys ontological modeling of rhetorical concepts, developed for use in argument mining and other applications of computational rhetoric, projecting their future directions. We include ontological models of argument schemes applying Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST); the RhetFig proposal for modeling; the related RetFig Ontology of Rhetorical Figures for Serbian (developed by two o...

Organizations constantly produce and consume organizational language, and these texts and documents are a primary way that organizations interact with their environment. In this paper we compare different types of texts to study variation in how organizations use them to interact with the environment. We argue that the authors of a text will primarily use rhetorical strategies that reflect the ...

Rhetorical structure theory (RST) provides a model of textual function based upon rhetoric. Initially developed as a model of text coherence, RST has been used extensively in text generation research, and has more recently been proposed as a basis for multimedia presentation generation. This paper investigates the use of RST for generating video presentations having a rhetorical form, using mod...

Sequence Models and Ranking Methods for Discourse Parsing A dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts by Ben Wellner Many important aspects of natural language reside beyond the level of a single sentence or clause, at the level of the discourse, including: reference relations such anaphora, notions of topic/...

Introspection is a question-led process in which one builds on what one already knows to explore what is possible and plausible. In creative introspection, whether in art or in science, framing the right question is as important as finding the right answer. Presupposition-laden questions are themselves a source of knowledge, and in this paper we show how widely-held beliefs about the world can ...

We propose a robust answer reranking model for non-factoid questions that integrates lexical semantics with discourse information, driven by two representations of discourse: a shallow representation centered around discourse markers, and a deep one based on Rhetorical Structure Theory. We evaluate the proposed model on two corpora from different genres and domains: one from Yahoo! Answers and ...

People often turn to their social networks to fulfill their information needs. We conducted a study of question asking and answering (Q&A) behavior on Twitter. We found that the most popular question types were rhetorical and factual. Surprisingly, along with entertainment and technology questions, people asked personal and health-related questions. The majority of questions received no respons...

We present a shift-reduce rhetorical parsing algorithm that learns to construct rhetorical structures of texts from a corpus of discourse-parse action sequences. The algorithm exploits robust lexical, syntactic, and semantic knowledge sources.

Economists included knowledge their models to improve their explanatory accuracy. A major step was to describe the production of knowledge as well as its exploitation as an internal part of economic models. Politicians prefer to talk about a new kind of economy so they can sustain the myth of progress. Rather than explain economies using a new model they try to leave economic history intact whi...

This study exploits statistical redundancy inherent in natural language to automatically predict scores for essays. We use a hybrid feature identification method, including syntactic structure analysis, rhetorical structure analysis, and topical analysis, to score essay responses from test-takers of the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) and the Test of Written English (TWE). For each e...