In this paper we investigate whether paragraphs can be identified automatically in different languages and domains. We propose a machine learning approach which exploits textual and discourse cues and we assess how well humans perform on this task. Our best models achieve an accuracy that is significantly higher than the best baseline and, for most data sets, comes to within 6% of human perform...

This article describes a contrastive study on rhetorical differences between Italian and English sales promotion letters. It is assumed that cultural differences affect discourse genres traditionally considered as standardized, ritual or even formulaic, written business communication being a case in point. It was our goal to investigate how information is presented and what rhetorical strategie...

We present a hybrid text understanding methodology for the resolution of textual ellipsis. It integrates language-independent conceptual criteria and language-dependent functional constraints. The methodological framework for text ellipsis resolution is the centering model that has been adapted to constraints reflecting the functional information structure within utterances, i.e., the distincti...

Estimating the geographic location of images is a task which has received a lot of attention in recent years. Large numbers of items uploaded to Flickr do not contain GPS-based latitude/longitude coordinates, although it would be beneficial to obtain such geographic information for a wide variety of potential applications such as travelogues and visual place descriptions. While most works in th...

This article contributes to knowledge of how one category of business organization, very large, British-based, natural resource extraction corporations, has begun to manage its operations for sustainability. The object of study is a large volume of texts that make representations of the managing-for-sustainability practices of these multinational corporations (MNCs). The macro-level textual ana...

An unprecedented combination of simulative and metaphor-based reasoning about beliefs is achieved in an AI system, ATT-Meta. Much mundane discourse about beliefs uses conceptual metaphors (e.g., MIND AS CONTAINER) productively, and ATT-Meta's metaphor-based reasoning accordingly leads to crucial discourse comprehension decisions. ATT-Meta's non-metaphorical mode of belief reasoning includes sim...

Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) technologies play an increasing role simultaneously with the appearance of the Social Web. The polyphonic analysis method based on Bakhtin’s dialogical model reflects the multi-voiced nature of a CSCL conversation and the related learning processes. We propose the extension of the model and the previous applications of the polyphonic method to bo...

There exist various different discourse annotation schemes that vary both in the perspectives of discourse structure considered and the granularity of textual units that are annotated. Comparison and integration of multiple schemes have the potential to provide enhanced information. However, the differing formats of corpora and tools that contain or produce such schemes can be a barrier to thei...

This article attempts a critical examination of the actual digital art production, posing key questions about its artistic value inside contemporary esthetic discourse, including relationships with system. Considering properties numeric language, two important topics will be discussed: dialectic artwork-process and meaning multimedia. With support up-to-date computational creativity theories ev...