This study investigates the prosody of rhetorical questions in German. In an interaction study we examined how speakers use boundary tones, pitch, duration and voice quality to mark syntactically ambiguous questions as rhetorical or information seeking. To this end, speakers produced identical interrogatives (polar and wh questions) in rhetorical and information seeking contexts. The results sh...

This paper discusses a fundamental problem in natural language generation: how to organize the content of a text in a coherent and natural way. In this research, we set out to determine the semantic content and the rhetorical structure of texts and to develop heuristics to perform this process automatically within a text generation framework. The study was performed on a specific language and t...

The oral case presentation is an important communicative activity in the teaching and assessment of students. Despite its importance, not much attention has been paid to providing support for teachers to teach this difficult task to medical students who are novices to this form of communication. As a formalized piece of talk that takes a regularized form and used for a specific communicative go...

J C P H – Vol. 68, no 6 – novembre–décembre 2015 498 It is my hope that these simple acts, whether I perform them while talking to a staff member or to a patient, will make the individual realize that I have been listening and have heard his or her concerns. The Hospital Pharmacy in Canada 2013/14 Report highlighted the CSHP 2015 objectives crowned with success and those with room for improveme...

The investigation presented in this paper is a novel method in question answering (QA) that enables a QA system to gain performance through reuse of information in the answer to one question to answer another related question. Our analysis shows that a pair of question in a general open domain QA can have embedding relation through their mentions of noun phrase expressions. We present methods f...

This paper presents an approach towards the definition of a formal framework for rhetorical argumentation. Before describing the competence theory behind the framework, we introduce the notion of rhetorical argument, and describe the New Rhetoric, a well known theory in the philosophy of argumentation, upon which our work is based.

The Didactic Networks proposed in this paper are based on previous publications in the field of the RSR (Rhetorical-Semantic Relations). The RSR is a set of primitive relations used for building a specific kind of semantic networks for artificial intelligence applications on the web: the RSN (Rhetorical-Semantic Networks). We bring into focus the RSR application in the field of elearning, by de...

This work aims to explore the correlation between the discourse structure of a spoken monologue and its prosody by predicting discourse relations from different prosodic attributes. For this purpose, a corpus of semi-spontaneous monologues in English has been automatically annotated according to the Rhetorical Structure Theory, which models coherence in text via rhetorical relations. From corre...

Overloaded and disinterested consumers have become skillful at screening out ads. In response, advertisers employ and combine various strategies, with two major ones being (a) rhetorical figures (e.g., rhyme, puns) and (b) message repetition. Though each has received substantial research attention and is crucial to advertising theory, they have not been examined simultaneously. We conducted a m...

This study examined the effect of two different authentic topic-familiar rhetorical L2 listening tasks (expository and argumentative) differing in reasoning demand on the listening comprehension scores of a number of Iranian EFL advanced learners. Sixty homogeneous advanced learners were recruited based on their performance on an English Language Proficiency test (Fowler & Coe, 1976). Then they...