Abstract The rhetorical question, often assumed to have been favoured by the sophist Gorgias, became a fundamental feature of ancient rhetoric in both Greek and Latin. By time Senecan tragedy, an accumulation as many seventeen serial questions can be found expressing extremes emotion, especially indignation or despair. Rhetorical some archaic classical authors received limited attention, for ex...

the efficacy of genre-based approach to teaching writing has been regarded as an influential practice in l2 writing pedagogy (hyland, 2007). however, there is still gap between actual structures found in reading materials recommended as textbooks and discourse patterns recommended for l2 writing in efl contexts, the gap which would highlight the problems of genre and rhetorical patterns for tea...

In this position paper, we argue Ibr the need for a generation system to represent communicative goals (i.e., goals that express the speaker's intent to aflect the bearer's mental attitudes), at least if certain tasks are to be achieved. We lurther argue that, wlfile rhetorical relations might be recoverable t tom other Iactors, they appear to be a useful level of abstraction to maintain about ...

A model of layout in illustrated documents must be informed by the rhetorical structure of the content. However, real-life production constraints often force an ‘imperfect’ realisation of the rhetorical structure on the page. Navigational elements must consequently be introduced into the layout to support the reading path. Layout structures, including the placement of the navigational elements,...

The Text2Dialogue (T2D) system that we are developing allows digital content creators to generate attractive multi-modal dialogues presented by two virtual agents—by simply providing textual information as input. We use Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to decompose text into segments and to identify rhetorical discourse relations between them. These are then “acted out” by two 3D agents using ...

We discuss a tagging schema and a tagging tool for labeling the rhetorical structure of texts. We also propose a statistical method for measuring agreement of hierarchical structure annotations and we discuss its strengths and weaknesses. The statistical measure we use suggests that annotators can achieve good levels of agreement on the task of determining the high-level, rhetorical structure o...

This paper introduces an approach to generate video clips starting from an annotated commentary. The novelty of the approach lies in the use of rhetorical structure of the accompanying audio commentary in planning the video. The basic notions of cinematography are briefly introduced together with the Rhetorical Relation Theory to model the structure of a discourse. Then, the architecture of a v...

This study investigates the prosody of rhetorical questions in German. In an interaction study we examined how speakers use boundary tones, pitch, duration and voice quality to mark syntactically ambiguous questions as rhetorical or information seeking. To this end, speakers produced identical interrogatives (polar and wh questions) in rhetorical and information seeking contexts. The results sh...

This paper discusses a fundamental problem in natural language generation: how to organize the content of a text in a coherent and natural way. In this research, we set out to determine the semantic content and the rhetorical structure of texts and to develop heuristics to perform this process automatically within a text generation framework. The study was performed on a specific language and t...

The oral case presentation is an important communicative activity in the teaching and assessment of students. Despite its importance, not much attention has been paid to providing support for teachers to teach this difficult task to medical students who are novices to this form of communication. As a formalized piece of talk that takes a regularized form and used for a specific communicative go...