Many theories of discourse structure rely on the idea that the segments comprising the discourse are linked through inferred relations such as causality and temporal contiguity. These theories suggest that the resulting discourse is represented hierarchically. Two experiments examine some of the implications of these hierarchical structures on the perceived coherence of texts. Experiment 1 show...

We experiment with different ways of training LSTM networks to predict RST discourse trees. The main challenge for RST discourse parsing is the limited amounts of training data. We combat this by regularizing our models using task supervision from related tasks as well as alternative views on discourse structures. We show that a simple LSTM sequential discourse parser takes advantage of this mu...

We present the first corpus of texts annotated with two alternative approaches to discourse structure, Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988) and Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (Asher and Lascarides, 2003). 112 short argumentative texts have been analyzed according to these two theories. Furthermore, in previous work, the same texts have already been annotated for thei...

This study shares the view that reference in discourse is influenced by the distance to prior mentions of the referent in the discourse. Kibrik (1996, 1999) suggested a measurement of rhetorical distance to assess this factor. In this paper we address three complications created by that methodology when applied to a large corpus of written newspaper texts. These problems include: difference bet...

Earlier studies have raised the possibility of summarizing at the level of the sentence. This simplification should help in adapting textual content in a limited space. Therefore, sentence compression is an important resource for automatic summarization systems. However, there are few studies that consider sentence-level discourse segmentation for compression task; to our knowledge, none in Spa...

Computational approaches to discourse understanding have a two-part goal: (1) identifying those aspects of discourse understanding that require process-based accounts, and (2) characterizing the processes and data structures they involve. To date, in the area of reference, process-based accounts have been developed for reference via anaphoric pronouns and via definite descriptors. In this paper...

In this article we are concerned with identifying topics of utterances in texts, which are discourse elements reflecting the links between a sentence and its context. The information carried by the topics can be used to contribute to a number of natural language processing applications, such as information retrieval, text categorization and discourse segmentation etc. However, the phenomenon of...

Humans process language word by word and construct partial linguistic structures on the fly before the end of the sentence is perceived. Inspired by this cognitive ability, incremental algorithms for natural language processing tasks have been proposed and demonstrated promising performance. For discourse relation (DR) parsing, however, it is not yet clear to what extent humans can recognize DR...