Many essential components of language charted by rhetoric, the ancient study of persuasion, remain understudied and underrepresented in current Natural Language systems. Our goal is to combine linguistic and rhetorical theories with discourse analysis and machine learning to develop formal models of computational rhetoric that may be usefully applied in real-world Computational Linguistics syst...

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...

Transitioning from graduate student to early career faculty can often provoke uncertainty and questioning. This study explores the rhetorical revealing nature of such questioning (i.e., Am I really this lost? in right place?). Utilizing methods arts based research (Barone & Eisner, 2012), specifically poetic inquiry (Prendergast et al., 2009; Richardson, 1992), we created found poetry aroun...

Abstract There are three main schools for the study of ethos: pragmatic-discursive; symbolic interactionist, and rhetorical one. This paper aims to give an encompassing fuller perspective on ethos that can be useful contemporary uses persuasive communication, including media communication such as advertising or marketing communication. Primarily, it outlines conceptual employments has suffered ...

The organization of discourse is multifaceted. Theories that take a single perspective on discourse structure, examining for example only goal satisfaction or textual coherence or ignoring the context in which a text was generated, will fail to identify the full functional significance of the content and organization of text. The task of generating coherent text to meet some communicative inten...

A study of a small corpus of pharmaceutical leaflets supports the hypothesis that a subset of Mann and Thompson’s Rhetorical Relations may hold within as well as between clauses, with one or more propositional arguments nominalised. This paper summarises the main results of this study and outlines a formal account of the phenomenon within a framework of discourse generation, whereby nominalisat...

We consider two hypotheses about how rhetorical structure and QUD structure might come together to provide a more general pragmatic theory. Taking SDRT ([2]) and some basic principles from [18]’s QUD framework as starting points, we first consider the possibility that rhetorical relations can be modelled as QUDs, and vice versa. We ultimately reject this hypothesis in favor of the possibility t...

Previous work on discourse parsing has mostly relied on surface syntactic and lexical features; the use of semantics is limited to shallow semantics. The goal of this thesis is to exploit event semantics in order to build discourse parse trees (DPT) based on informational rhetorical relations. Our work employs an Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) based rhetorical relation classifier, a Neural N...