In the project SemDok (Generic document structures in linearly organised texts) funded by the German Research Foundation DFG, a discourse parser for a complex type (scientific articles by example), is being developed. Discourse parsing (henceforth DP) according to the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) (Mann and Taboada, 2005; Marcu, 2000) deals with automatically assigning a text a tree structu...

To better understand the promising effects of data-driven learning (DDL) on language learning processes and outcomes, this study explored DDL learning events enabled by the Research Writing Tutor (RWT), a webbased platform that contains: an English language corpus annotated to enhance rhetorical input; a concordancer searchable for rhetorical functions; and an automated writing evaluation engin...

Graduate students face a fundamental change in identity when transitioning from undergraduate writers to graduate writers. In their new role as graduate writers and researchers, they must move from consuming knowledge to producing knowledge through their writing. Often, they must learn new genres of writing, new disciplinary conventions, and new rhetorical models. For non-native English speaker...

We propose a methodology for automatically realizing communicative goals in graphics. It features a task model that mediates the communicative intent and the selection of graphical techniques. The methodology supports the following functions: isolating assertions presentable in graphics; mapping such assertions into tasks for the potential reader, and selecting graphical techniques that support...

Scientific papers revolve around citations, and for many discourse level tasks one needs to know whose work is being talked about at any point in the discourse. In this paper, we introduce the scientific attribution task, which links different linguistic expressions to citations. We discuss the suitability of different evaluation metrics and evaluate our classification approach to deciding attr...

This paper presents rstWeb, a new browserbased interface for Rhetorical Structure Theory and other discourse relation annotations. Expanding on previous tools for RST, rstWeb allows annotators to work online using only a browser. Project administrators can easily collect multiple annotations of the same documents on a central server, keep track of annotation processes and assign tasks and annot...