This paper applies machine learning techniques to acquiring aspects of the meaning of discourse markers. Three subtasks of acquiring the meaning of a discourse marker are considered: learning its polarity, veridicality, and type (i.e. causal, temporal or additive). Accuracy of over 90% is achieved for all three tasks, well above the baselines.

Usually, by Multi-Word Expressions (MWEs) we mean expressions whose structure and meaning cannot be derived from their component words as they occur independently. In this talk I will discuss a different kind of multi-word expressions that behave as discourse relation markers (DRMs), yet do not seem to belong to well-defined syntactic classes. The apparent open-endedness of these expressions is...

e) after 350ms wait you should produce back-channel feedback. Our model for English is the same except for some parameters: pitch level (clause a) 26th-percentile, recovery time (clause d) 800ms, and delay (clause e) 700ms. 1 I n t r o d u c t i o n Back-channel feedback, also called "listener responses'~ is, to a first approximation, those responses produced by one participant which do not int...

Due to the significance of multiculturalism in politics, and the central role linguistic devices play in organizing the political discourse, this text-based qualitative study was carried out to compare political interviews in the Iranian and English contexts to find out the probable similarities and differences in the use of discourse markers (DMs) between the two cultures. To this end, three s...

Discourse relations are links between utterances and sentences or sentence parts. These can be implicit or explicit through markers such as because, before, but, etc. Thus, the causal discourse relation between the two clauses that is explicit in 'He fell because he stumbled over a stone' can be inferred in the sentence 'He stumbled over a stone and fell'. Much research in this field focuses on...

Academic discourse has always been the focus of many linguists, especially those who have been involved with English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and discourse analysis. Persuasion, as part of rhetorical structure of academic writing, is partly achieved by employing modality markers.  Adopting a descriptive design, the present study was carried out to compare the use of modality markers in terms...

This study aims to test quantitatively whether lled pauses (FPs) may highlight discourse structure. More speci cally, it is rst investigated whether FPs are more typical in the vicinity of major discourse boundaries. Secondly, the FPs are analyzed acoustically, to check whether those occurring at major discourse boundaries are segmentally and prosodically di erent from those at shallower breaks...

To understand a discourse the reader needs to recover the relations between the discourse elements as intended by the writer Writers can and very often do help the reader along by providing explicit lexical signals of the intended discourse relations through the use of lexicalised discourse markers In this paper we present a novel approach for generating texts containing multiple embedded rheto...

According to many research findings, the presence of discourse markers (DMs) enhances readers’ comprehension of the texts they read. However, there is a paucity of research on the relationship between knowledge of DMs and reading comprehension (RC) and the present study explores the relationship between them. Knowledge of DMs is measured through examining the subjects’ recognition of DMs. To ca...

(2003). Towards a taxonomy of a set of discourse markers in dialog: a theoretical and computational linguistic account. Abstract Discourse markers are verbal and non-verbal devices that mark transition points in communication. They presumably facilitate the construction of a mental representation of the events described by the discourse. A taxonomy of these relational markers is one important b...