The Writing Pal is an intelligent tutoring system that provides writing strategy training. A large part of its artificial intelligence resides in the natural language processing algorithms to assess essay quality and guide feedback to students. Because writing is often highly nuanced and subjective, the development of these algorithms must consider a broad array of linguistic, rhetorical, and c...

We derive the rhetorical structures of texts by means of two new, surface-form-based algorithms: one that identifies discourse usages of cue phrases and breaks sentences into clauses, and one that produces valid rhetorical structure trees for unrestricted natural language texts. The algorithms use information that was derived from a corpus analysis of cue phrases.

A significant challenge in Text-to-Speech (TtS) synthesis is the formulation of the prosodic structures (phrase breaks, pitch accents, phrase accents and boundary tones) of utterances. The prediction of these elements robustly relies on the accuracy and the quality of error-prone linguistic procedures, such as the identification of the part-of-speech and the syntactic tree. Additional linguisti...

This paper attempts to show that the intellectual construct women’s language is entirely justified on a political, ideological, and economic basis that stresses the fact that women have historically been victims of overt (and covert) discrimination and exploitation in our society. Linguistically speaking, however, a women’s language seems not to exist in traditional strict terms, but rather as ...

At present, discourse parsing is an important research topic. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is one of the most popular approaches in this field. In general, discourse parsing includes three stages: discourse segmentation, discourse relations detection and building up rhetorical trees. Different strategies are used when developing discourse parsers. One of the strategies to detect discourse ...

The notion that a text is coherent in virtue of the `relations' which hold between the elements of that text has become fairly common currency, both in the study of discourse coherence and in the eld of text generation. The set of relations proposed in Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson [14]) has had particular in uence in both of these elds. But the widespread adoption of `relation...

Nowadays automatic systems for detecting and measuring textual similarity are being developed, in order to apply them to different tasks in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Currently, these systems use surface linguistic features or statistical information. Nowadays, few researchers use deep linguistic information. In this work, we present an algorithm for detecting and measuring...

A key element of academic writing involves incorporation of external voices, which is a complex rhetorical and linguistic task. Student writers must face this challenge of using sources to strengthen their own arguments. Appraisal, specifically Engagement, provides a useful framework for analyzing source use in texts, as it considers evaluation and dialogic voicing. This article describes a sem...