To understand a discourse, the reader needs to recover the relations between the discourse elements as intended by the writer. Writers can, and very often do, help the reader along by providing explicit lexical signals of the intended discourse relations through the use of lexicalised discourse markers. In this paper we present a novel approach for generating texts containing multiple, embedded...

This study explores the potential of a theory of discourse coherence relations to distinguish between truth and deception. It uses Rhetorical Structure Theory and logistic regression to build a deception model that achieves 78% accuracy on a sample of goldstandard Amazon book reviews drawn from the Deceptive Review corpus. It finds Contrast discourse relations to be a significant predictor of v...

This paper addresses discourse structure from the perspective of understanding. It would perhaps help us understand the nature of discourse relations if we better understood what units of a text can be related to one another. In one major theory of discourse structure, Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann & Thompson 1988; hereafter simply RST), the smallest possible linguistic units that can parti...

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) is an area that requires a lot of technical documents and an important feature of a well-written document is a coherent narrative. Even though computer software has helped authors in many other aspects of writing, support for document narratives is almost non-existent. Therefore, we introduce CANS (Computer-Aided Narrative Support), a tool that uses Rhetori...

RSTTool is a graphical tool for annotating a text in terms of its rhetorical structure. The demonstration will show the various interfaces of the tool, focusing on its ease of use. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n This paper describes the RSTTool, a graphical interface for marking up the structure of text. While primarily intended to be used for marking up Rhetorical Structure (cf. Rhetorical Structur...

Rhetorical structure theory (RST) is widely used for discourse understanding, which represents a discourse as a hierarchically semantic structure. In this paper, we propose a novel translation framework with the help of RST. In our framework, the translation process mainly includes three steps: 1) Source RST-tree acquisition: a source sentence is parsed into an RST tree; 2) Rule extraction: tra...

The implicit rhetorical features of academic writing which has so far eluded a comprehensive systematic characterization have made teaching it a challenging task for a large group of practitioners in academic setting. One such feature of academic writing susceptible to cultural mentalities is metadiscourse marking, which is supposed to be one of the important rhetorical aspects in the writing p...

Past research is not clear on the process by which rhetorical questions influence persuasion (i.e., increased focus on message arguments vs. on the persuasion agent). Based on recent theories of persuasion knowledge and rhetorical figures in advertising, our model delineates conditions under which rhetoricals are likely to enhance argument elaboration (low salience of the rhetorical) and those ...

Representing a document as a bag-of-words and using keywords to retrieve relevant documents have seen a great success in large scale information retrieval systems such as Web search engines. Bag-of-words representation is computationally efficient and with proper term weighting and document ranking methods can perform surprisingly well for a simple document representation method. However, such ...