In this paper, we offer a novel method for processing given information in discourse, paying particular attention to definite descriptions. We argue that extant theories don’t do justice to the complexity of interaction between the knowledge resources that are used. In line with Hobbs (1979), we claim that discourse structure—as defined by the rhetorical connections between the propositions int...

The paper discusses the development of rhetorical analyses of political addresses from classical antiquity to modern political communication. A specific genre, the ‘epideictic address’, is described in detail. It concerns addresses by representative persons. Most epideictic addresses turn out to be ‘hybrid’ texts because they combine an orientation towards (rhetorical-political) persuasion with...

Scott and Souza (1990) have posed the problem of how a rhetorical structure (in which propositions are linked by rhetorical relations, but not yet arranged in a linear order) can be realized by a text structure (in which propositions are ordered and linked up by appropriate discourse connectives). Almost all work on this problem assumes, implicitly or explicitly, that this mapping is governed b...

Early formulations of discourse coherence constraints postulated a connection between coreference likelihood and distance within a discourse parse, e.g. in the framework of Veins Theory (Cristea et al. 1998%CristeaIdeRomary1998), which proposes that coreference is expected to be encapsulated within tightly linked areas of discourse parses, called Domains of Referential Accessibility (DRAs). Usi...

This study was set to reveal how second language learners use rhetorical relations in their written narratives in terms of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) primarily proposed by Mann & Thompson (1987) and developed by Mann, Matthiessen & Thompson (1992). To this end, sixty written narratives based on the picture story book ‘Frog, where are you?’ were collected from EFL learners and were put to...

Document-level sentiment analysis is among the most popular research fields of nature language processing in recent years, in which one of major challenges is that discourse structural information can be hardly captured by existing approaches. In this paper, a domain-independent framework for documentlevel sentiment classification with weighting rules based on Rhetorical Structure Theory is pro...

AIMS To determine the likelihood of finding an antivaccination site on the world wide web and to characterise their explicit claims and rhetorical appeals. METHODS Using "vaccination" and "immunisation", examining the first 10 sites displayed on seven leading search engines. Detailed examination of content of 100 antivaccination sites found on Google. RESULTS 43% of websites were antivaccin...

In this paper, we propose a novel idea for applying probabilistic graphical models for automatic text summarization task related to a legal domain. Identification of rhetorical roles present in the sentences of a legal document is the important text mining process involved in this task. A Conditional Random Field (CRF) is applied to segment a given legal document into seven labeled components a...

The rhetorical classification of sentences in biomedical texts is an important task in the recognition of the components of a scientific argument. Generating supervised machine learned models to do this recognition requires corpora annotated for the rhetorical categories Introduction (or Background), Method, Result, Discussion (or Conclusion). Currently, a few, small annotated corpora exist. We...

This paper presents a corpus study of parenthetical constructions in two different corpora: the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB, (PDTBGroup, 2008)) and the RST Discourse Treebank (Carlson et al., 2001). The motivation for the study is to gain a better understanding of the rhetorical properties of parentheticals in order to enable a natural language generation system to produce parentheticals as p...