the efficacy of genre-based approach to teaching writing has been regarded as an influential practice in l2 writing pedagogy (hyland, 2007). however, there is still gap between actual structures found in reading materials recommended as textbooks and discourse patterns recommended for l2 writing in efl contexts, the gap which would highlight the problems of genre and rhetorical patterns for tea...

generation is, like Machine Translation, one of the ultimate goal of Natural Language Processing. However, since conventional word–frequency– based abstract generation systems(e.g. [Kuhn 58]) are lacking in inter-sentential or discourse-structural analysis, they are liable to generate incoherent abstracts. On the other hand, conventional knowledge or script–based abstract generation systems(e.g...

Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988, Taboada and Mann, 2006) postulates that a coherent text can be characterized by means of a tree structure whose leaves are the “elementary discourse units” (henceforth: EDUs), and whose internal nodes are labelled with a coherence relation. The theory proposes a list of about 25 such relations, which may be said to hold between two EDUs or (...

Manually annotating the rhetorical structure of texts is very labour-intensive. At the same time, high-quality automatic analysis is currently out of reach. We thus propose to split the manual annotation in two phases: the simpler marking of lexical connectives and their relations, and the more difficult decisions on overall tree structure. To this end, we developed an environment of two analys...

Hypermedia communicative devices are patterns of hypermedia presentation structure with specific affects on the user. Some devices have been determined for affecting the user with abstract authoring constructs, such as rhetorical structure. However, these devices each typically focus on particular aspects of the structure of hypermedia presentation. This paper presents a framework for hypermedi...

I use the distinction between the nuclei and the satellites that pertain to discourse relations to introduce a compositionality criterion for discourse trees. I provide a first-order formalization of rhetorical structure trees and, on its basis, I derive an algorithm that constructs all the valid rhetorical trees that can be associated with a given discourse.

A model of layout in illustrated documents must be informed by the rhetorical structure of the content. However, real-life production constraints often force an ‘imperfect’ realisation of the rhetorical structure on the page. Navigational elements must consequently be introduced into the layout to support the reading path. Layout structures, including the placement of the navigational elements,...

We discuss a tagging schema and a tagging tool for labeling the rhetorical structure of texts. We also propose a statistical method for measuring agreement of hierarchical structure annotations and we discuss its strengths and weaknesses. The statistical measure we use suggests that annotators can achieve good levels of agreement on the task of determining the high-level, rhetorical structure o...

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...

The paper deals with the cohesion part of a model of global discourse interpretation, usually known as Veins Theory (VT). By taking the notion of nuclearity (though ignoring relations), from the Rhetorical Structure Theory, VT computes strings of discourse units, called veins, from which domains of accessibility can be determined for each discourse unit. VT’s constructs best fit with an increme...