Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988, Taboada and Mann, 2006) postulates that a coherent text can be characterized by means of a tree structure whose leaves are the “elementary discourse units” (henceforth: EDUs), and whose internal nodes are labelled with a coherence relation. The theory proposes a list of about 25 such relations, which may be said to hold between two EDUs or (...

Abstract Rhetorical structure is helpful in improving how the writers maintain cohesion in their writings. This study examines how the Iraqi writers maintain cohesion in the text by analyzing the various rhetorical moves in Azzaman, an online Iraqi newspaper. To this purpose, twelve opinion articles from Azzaman Iraqi newspaper, published from January 2013 to June 2013 were analyzed. The findin...

Our paper describes the Rhetorical Figure Ontology Project, a multidisciplinary research project that is presently working towards the development of a comprehensive database of rhetorical figures, an associated wiki, and, ultimately, an ontology of rhetorical figures. The database and wiki project provide the dataset and space for the conceptual development, respectively, to create an ontology...

SciPo is a system whose ultimate goal is to support novice writers in producing academic texts in Brazilian Portuguese through presentation of critiques and suggestions. Currently, it focuses on the rhetorical structure of texts, being capable of automatically detecting and criticizing the rhetorical structure of Abstract sections. We describe a system that enhances SciPo’s functionality by eva...

The availability of huge amounts of online opinions has created a new need to develop effective query-based opinion summarizers to analyze this information in order to facilitate decision making at every level. To develop an effective opinion summarization approach, we have targeted to resolve specifically Question Irrelevancy and Discourse Incoherency problems which have been found to be the m...

An important factor of argument mining in dialog or multilog data is the framing with which interlocutors put forth their arguments. By using rhetorical devices such as hedging or reference to the Common Ground, speakers relate themselves to their interlocutors, their arguments, and the ongoing discourse. Capitalizing on theoretical linguistic insights into the semantics and pragmatics of disco...

The notion of communicative competence has been deemed fuzzy in communication studies. This fuzziness has led to tensions among engineers across tenures in interpreting what constitutes communicative competence. The study seeks to investigate novice and professional engineers’ understanding of the said notion in terms of two main elements of communicative competence: linguistic and rhetorical c...

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...

We examine how nonveridical markers and rhetorical relations contribute to the expression of Appraisal (evaluation) in discourse. First, we define nonveridicality and nonveridical contexts, following Giannakidou (Polarity Sensitivity as (Non)Veridical Dependency. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 1998). We then relate nonveridicality to modality, Appraisal and rhetorical relations, and present a map o...