While 3D space has become almost ubiquitous in computer games that apply narrative techniques, theoretical frameworks and practical experiments about the use of virtual space are underdeveloped compared to the number of works that deal with literary textual pieces such as MUDs. Offering one element to fill this gap, the notion of a Story Map is introduced in this paper. The interactor’s experie...

We present a framework for the integrated analysis of the textual and prosodic characteristics of information structure in the Switchboard corpus of conversational English. Information structure describes the availability, organisation and salience of entities in a discourse model. We present standards for the annotation of information status (old, mediated and new), and give guidelines for ann...

A fact often not made explicit by syntacticians is that these labels need to be interpreted in semantics. The semantics of tenses has been formulated as a theory of temporal reference since the seminal work of Reichenbach (1947). Subsequently this theory has been integrated into a theory of context change, which widens the domain of tense semantics from the sentence to discourse (Kamp. 1979, Ka...

This paper presents a new framework, “text as scene”, which lays the foundations for the annotation of two coreferential links: discourse deixis and bridging relations. The incorporation of what we call textual and contextual scenes provides more flexible annotation guidelines, broad type categories being clearly differentiated. Such a framework that is capable of dealing with discourse deixis ...

Researchers in discourse have long hypothesized that the nuclei of a rhetorical structure tree provide a good summary of the text for which that tree was built. In this paper, I discuss a psychohnguistic experiment that validates this hypothesis, but that also shows that the distinction between nuclei and satelhtes is not sufficient if we want to build summaries of very high quality. I empirica...

We present in this article the results of experiments we led concerning disfluencies in the discourse of schizophrenic patients (in remediation). These experiments are part of a larger study dealing with other levels of linguistic analysis, that could eventually help identifying clues leading to the diagnostic of the disease. This study largely relies on natural language processing tools, which...

Comparison is often seen as only existing in two forms: COMPARE versus CONTRAST. To compare two or more things is to say how they are similar, and to contrast two or more things is to say how they are different. In this paper, we will show that there are, in fact, many different forms of comparison, each with a different discourse purpose. We will define six types of comparison that we have fou...

Information graphics (such as bar charts and line graphs) play a vital role in many multimodal documents. The majority of information graphics that appear in popular media are intended to convey a message and the graphic designer uses deliberate communicative signals, such as highlighting certain aspects of the graphic, in order to bring that message out. The graphic, whose communicative goal (...

This paper presents the methodology and semantics of a general procedure for the joint analysis of textual data in terms of discourse structure and information structure, which makes use of Questions under Discussion (QUDs). We define a number of pragmatic principles that govern the reconstruction of implicit QUDs.