Citations in scientific writing fulfil an important role in creating relationships among mutually relevant articles within a research field. These inter-article relationships reinforce the argumentation structure intrinsic to all scientific writing. Therefore, determining the nature of the exact relationship between a citing and cited paper requires an understanding of the rhetorical relations ...

A summary is provided of the problems of representing, determining generating and arranging disjunct multiple subarguments in several fields, including formal systems in uncertain domains, informal logic accounts of argument structure, rhetorical systems for maximising persuasive effect, and the automatic generation of persuasive discourse. Drawing upon the insights, problems, and partial solut...

The rhetorical theory of argument, if held as the conclusion of an argument, is self-defeating. There are two arguments that it is. First is the quick and dirty argument: the rhetorical theory is that argument quality is adjudged by eliciting conviction, but the case for the theory is not convincing. Second is the process argument: if one has the view that one’s reasons are arranged with the so...

In this position paper, we argue Ibr the need for a generation system to represent communicative goals (i.e., goals that express the speaker's intent to aflect the bearer's mental attitudes), at least if certain tasks are to be achieved. We lurther argue that, wlfile rhetorical relations might be recoverable t tom other Iactors, they appear to be a useful level of abstraction to maintain about ...

Given the prevalence of the use of rhetorical relations in the generation of text (Itovy, 1989; Moore and Paris, 1988; Scott and Souza, 1990), it is surprising how little work has actually been done on the grammatical realization of these relations. Most systems, based on Mann and Thompson's formulation of Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988), have adopted simplified solutions ...

Lexical cues are linguistic expressions that can signal the presence of a rhetorical relation. However, such cues can be ambiguous as they may signal more than one relation or may not always function as a relation indicator. In this study, we first conduct a corpus-based analysis to derive a set of n-grams as potential lexical cues. These cues are then utilized in graph-based probabilistic mode...

This essay works toward an integration of psychoanalysis and rhetorical theory in response to the poststructural critique of mediation. I argue that the concept of communication, usually understood as the mediation or reconciliation of Self and Other, is based on what Lacan termed the “fundamental fantasy.” Distinct from the conscious fantasies usually analyzed by rhetorical critics, the fundam...

Knowledge about the rhetorical structure of a text is useful for automatic abstraction. We are interested in the automatic extraction of rhetorical units from the source text, units such as Problem Statement, Conclusions and Results. We want to use such extracts to generate high-compression abstracts of scientiic articles. In this paper, we present an extension of Kupiec, Pedersen and Chen's (1...