This paper is concerned with rhetorical argumentation that aims to alter the beliefs of the listener, and so to influence his future actions, as opposed to classical argumentation that is concerned with the generation of arguments, usually as logical proofs, for and against a given course of action. Rhetorical argumentation includes rhetoric moves such as Threat, Reward and Appeal. Rhetorical a...

Corpus analysis of 54 naturally occurring introductions of Physics papers led to a detailed schematic structure comprising eight components that are realized linguistically through 30 rhetorical strategies. A strategy is made up of two or three rhetorical messages out of a set of 45 messages. Such a detailed analysis was required for employing the case-based reasoning approach in developing wri...

In the experimental psycholinguistic study we consider the correlation between one of activation in working memory factors (Kibrik 2010), namely a rhetorical distance to the pronoun antecedent and a successful reference resolution in Russian. Using Russian adaptation of the working memory span test from Daneman and Carpenter 1980 we demonstrated that a rhetorical distance is really a significan...

In this paper, we describe an n-gram approach to automatically assess essay quality in student writing. Underlying this approach is the development of n-gram indices that examine rhetorical, syntactic, grammatical, and cohesion features of paragraph types (introduction, body, and conclusion paragraphs) and entire essays. For this study, we developed over 300 n-gram indices and assessed their po...

The Department of Education (DoE) and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) are regulatory agencies in the system of accreditation that influence both the quality and reputation of colleges and universities. Recent criticism (e.g., Butler, 2012; Obama, 2013b; Weissburg, 2009; Wellman, 1998) of accreditation processes in the United States and changing legislation (i.e., DoE, 2014...

The Text2Dialogue (T2D) system that we are developing allows digital content creators to generate attractive multi-modal dialogues presented by two virtual agents—by simply providing textual information as input. We use Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to decompose text into segments and to identify rhetorical discourse relations between them. These are then “acted out” by two 3D agents using ...

We describe an XML-encoded corpus of texts in the legal domain which was gathered for an automatic summarisation project. We describe two distinct layers of annotation: manual annotation of the rhetorical status of sentences and an entirely automatic annotation process incorporating a host of individual linguistic processors. The manual rhetorical status annotation has been developed as trainin...

In this paper we investigate whether unsupervised models can be used to induce conventional aspects of rhetorical language in scientific writing. We rely on the intuition that the rhetorical language used in a document is general in nature and independent of the document’s topic. We describe a Bayesian latent-variable model that implements this intuition. In two empirical evaluations based on t...