Recent works in the NLP community show an increasing interest for the analysis of discourse structure, leading to a variety of models and applications. We claim that a constraint-based approach allows a high level, abstract, description of various discourse structures, together with the design of an operative framework for generic analysis methods. The CDML formalism (Constraint-based Discourse...

This study investigated the effectiveness of discourse structure-based graphic organizers (GOs) on students’ reading comprehension. Seventy learners were randomly divided in two equal experimental and control groups. They took a pre-test of reading comprehension. Then the experimental group analyzed the textual structures based on the frameworks of GOs and discussed the cohesive and coherent de...

A text partition model is proposed to determine the boundaries of discourse structures. It is based on association of noun-noun relations and noun-verb relations defined on discourse level and sentence level. Three factors are considered: 1) repetition of words, 2) importance of words, and 3) collocational semantics. Ten texts serve as experimental objects. The applications of the results to se...

The author describes a conceptual study towards mapping grounded natural language discourse representation structures to instances of controlled language statements. This can be achieved via a pipeline of preexisting state of the art technologies, namely natural language syntax to semantic discourse mapping, and a reduction of the latter to controlled language discourse, given a set of previous...

Tree-Adjoining Grammars (TAG) have been used both for syntactic parsing, with sentential grammars, and for discourse parsing, with discourse grammars. But the modeling of discourse connectives (coordinate conjunctions, subordinate conjunctions , adverbs, etc.) in TAG-based formalisms for discourse differ from their modeling in sentential grammars. Because of this mismatch, an intermediate, not ...

Right Frontier Constraint (RFC) is a principle widely used across discourse theories because it manages to explain a wide variety of discourse phenomena. However, interleaved structures, described for example in (Asher, 1993), seem to constitute a problem for the standard version of this principle. These constructions have been described as allowing discourse attachment to closed off constituen...

We propose a linguistically driven approach to represent discourse relations in Chinese text as sequences. We observe that certain surface characteristics of Chinese texts, such as the order of clauses, are overt markers of discourse structures, yet existing annotation proposals adapted from formalism constructed for English do not fully incorporate these characteristics. We present an annotate...

In a series of recent papers (Cristea and Webber, 1997; Webber and Joshi, 1998; Webber et al., 1999a; Webber et al., 1999b), we have argued for starting the analysis of discourse in the same way as one starts the analysis of a clause, looking at how its syntax and semantics project from the lexicon. This is complementary to the issue of discourse pragmatics – how these small syntactic units of ...

This paper is concerned with the robust analysis of the discourse structure of a text via underspecification. Most current discourse theories (e.g. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) by Mann and Thompson (1988), Abduction by Hobbs et al. (1993) or Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) by Asher (1993)) require detailed world and context knowledge for the derivation of the discourse str...