The aim of this paper is to compare the discourse structures proposed in RST, SDRT and dependency DAGs which extend the semantic level of MTT for discourses. The key question is the following: do these formalisms allow the representation of all the discourse structures which correspond to felicitous discourses and exclude those which correspond to infelicitous discourses? Hence the term of “str...

From a plausible cognitive hypothesis explaining how little children develop complex meaning structures, we come to the conclusion that linguistic meanings are planned. The plans, we call them discourse plans, are tree-like structures composed of primitive situations and establishing referential links between the situations and the context. Linguistic meanings are second order Lambda-terms deri...

This paper presents a novel approach to document-based discourse analysis by performing a global A* search over the space of possible structures while optimizing a global criterion over the set of potential coherence relations. Existing approaches to discourse analysis have so far relied on greedy search strategies or restricted themselves to sentence-level discourse parsing. Another advantage ...

Media can be a good representation of dominant ideologies in society. The analysis of such discourse can shed light on the mental and social structures of people in society. Adopting van Dijk’s (1995) layout of discourse ideology and his (2000) practical and general outline of ideological analysis, this study analyzes the Iranian movie A Separation, the winner of the 84th An...

This tiiesis addresses a difficult problem in text processing: crealing a System lo automalically dérive rhetorical structures o f text. Allhough thè rhelorical structure lias proven to be useful in many fields o f text processing sucli as text summarisation and information extraction, Systems that auiomalically generate rhetorical structures with high accuracy are difficult to find. This is bc...

Discourse Representation Theory is a specific name for the work of Hans Kamp in the area of dynamic interpretation of natural language. Also, it has gradually become a generic term for proposals for dynamic interpretation of natural language in the same spirit. These proposals have in common that each new sentence is interpreted in terms of the contribution it makes to an existing piece of inte...

We conducted an empirical analysis into the relation between control and discourse structure. We applied control criteria to four dialogues and identified 3 levels of discourse structure. We investigated the mechanism for changing control between these structures and found that utterance type and not cue words predicted shifts of control. Participants used certain types of signals when discours...