Discourse relations between text segments can be explicitly marked using discourse connectors (e.g., because), but by far not all discourse relations are marked explicitly. However, people are usually able to infer the intended relation. What kinds of cues do people rely on? Could they in principle use structural cues from the preceding discourse to anticipate upcoming discourse relations? This...

Research in discourse processing has identi ed two representational requirements for discourse planning systems. First, discourse plans must adequately represent the intentional structure of the utterances they produce in order to enable a computational discourse agent to respond e ectively to communicative failures [15]. Second, discourse plans must represent the informational structure of utt...

This paper describes the extension of the Ontologies of Linguistic Annotation (OLiA) with respect to discourse features. The OLiA ontologies provide a a terminology repository that can be employed to facilitate the conceptual (semantic) interoperability of annotations of discourse phenomena as found in the most important corpora available to the community, including OntoNotes, the RST Discourse...

In this paper we present an overview of recent developments in discourse theory and parsing under the Linguistic Discourse Model (LDM) framework, a semantic theory of discourse structure. We give a novel approach to the problem of discourse segmentation based on discourse semantics and sketch a limited but robust approach to symbolic discourse parsing based on syntactic, semantic and lexical ru...

In this paper, we introduce LiveTree, a core component of LIDAS, the Linguistic Discourse Analysis System for automatic discourse parsing with the Unified Linguistic Discourse Model (U-LDM) (X et al, 2004). LiveTree is an integrated workbench for supervised and unsupervised creation, storage and manipulation of the discourse structure of text documents under the U-LDM. The LiveTree environment ...

This paper presents a system for automatically generating discourse structures from written text. The system is divided into two levels: sentence-level and text-level. The sentence-level discourse parser uses syntactic information and cue phrases to segment sentences into elementary discourse units and to generate discourse structures of sentences. At the text-level, constraints about textual a...

This paper explores several aspects together for a fine-grained Chinese discourse analysis. We deal with the issues of ambiguous discourse markers, ambiguous marker linkings, and more than one discourse marker. A universal feature representation is proposed. The pair-once postulation, cross-discourse-unit-first rule and word-pair-marker-first rule select a set of discourse markers from ambiguou...

We argue in this paper that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within discourse structure, instead work anaphorically to contribute relational meaning, with only indirect dependence on discourse structure. This allows a simpler discourse structure to provide scaffolding for compositional semantics, and reveals multi...

We describe the Hindi Discourse Relation Bank project, aimed at developing a large corpus annotated with discourse relations. We adopt the lexically grounded approach of the Penn Discourse Treebank, and describe our classification of Hindi discourse connectives, our modifications to the sense classification of discourse relations, and some crosslinguistic comparisons based on some initial annot...

We propose a joint model for unsupervised induction of sentiment, aspect and discourse information and show that by incorporating a notion of latent discourse relations in the model, we improve the prediction accuracy for aspect and sentiment polarity on the sub-sentential level. We deviate from the traditional view of discourse, as we induce types of discourse relations and associated discours...