In this paper, we discuss dependencies between rhetorical discourse structure and relevance implicatures. We follow [3] and infer relevance implicatures from the assumption that an answer provides optimal information for solving an explicitly or implicitly given decision problem of the inquirer. Such a decision problem can be identified with a question raised in the conversation. Background que...

Research on citations has generally examined citations as part of a system of rewards or as a rhetorical tool for strengthening arguments. This study examines the role of citations both as reward and as rhetoric. The reward system was examined by tracing over time the citation patterns of 13 research articles by two groups of scientists in chaos theory. The rhetorical practices were examined by...

This paper addresses semantic ellipsis control in language generation for humancomputer dialogue. For this, the rhetorical structure of the dialogue is used, as well as a repository of facts that are accepted by the recipient of the utterance. Rhetorical structure is represented in the framework of SDRT, where rhetorical relations are grouped in “confirmation” and “contradiction” relations; the...

In this paper, we present a prototype that helps visualizing the relative importance of sentences extracted from medical texts using Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA). We propose to map rhetorical structures automatically recognized in the documents onto a set of communicative acts controlling the expression of an ECA. As a consequence, the ECA will dramatize a sentence to reflect its percei...

We present an annotation effort that involves adding a new layer of annotation to an existing corpus. We are interested in how rhetorical relations are signalled in discourse, and thus begin with a corpus already annotated for rhetorical relations, to which we add signalling information. We show that a very large number of relations carry signals that can help identify them as such. The detaile...

We present a tagging schema and a tagging tool for labeling the rhetorical structure of texts. We focus on presenting the difficulties that we faced in designing a discourse annotation manual and on discussing the choices that we made in order to address these difficulties. We report reliability results concerning our agreement on building the rhetorical structure of 90 texts of three genres: 3...

Discourse markers foreshadow the message thrust of texts and saliently guide their rhetorical structure which are important for content filtering and text abstraction. This paper reports on efforts to automatically identify and classify discourse markers in Chinese texts using heuristic-based and corpus-based data-mining methods, as an integral part of automatic text summarization via rhetorica...

Legal argumentation can be modeled using logic, but in this chapter it is claimed that logic alone does not suffice. A model should also take the rhetoric nature of legal argumentation into account. DiaLaw is such a model: a formal, procedural model in which the logical and rhetorical aspects of argumentation are combined. The core of this chapter consists of a description of the basic concepts...