Sentences form coherent relations in a discourse without discourse connectives more frequently than with connectives. Senses of these implicit discourse relations that hold between a sentence pair, however, are challenging to infer. Here, we employ Brown cluster pairs to represent discourse relation and incorporate coreference patterns to identify senses of implicit discourse relations in natur...

Previous experimental studies on concessive connectives have only looked at their local facilitating or predictive effect on discourse relation comprehension and have often viewed them as a class of discourse markers with similar effects. We look into the effect of two connectives, but and although, for inferring contrastive vs. concessive discourse relations to complement previous experimental...

Studies of discourse relations have not, in the past, attempted to characterize what serves as evidence for them, beyond lists of frozen expressions, or markers, drawn from a few well-defined syntactic classes. In this paper, we describe how the lexicalized discourse relation annotations of the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) led to the discovery of a wide range of additional expressions, annota...

The paper presents machine translation experiments from English to Czech with a large amount of manually annotated discourse connectives. The gold-standard discourse relation annotation leads to better translation performance in ranges of 4–60% for some ambiguous English connectives and helps to find correct syntactical constructs in Czech for less ambiguous connectives. Automatic scoring confi...

This paper describes an application of Centering Theory (Grosz et al. 1995) to dialogue in Spanish. Centering is a theory of local focus and local discourse coherence. It also relates focus in discourse to choice of referring expression. In this paper, I discuss the analysis of nine task-oriented conversations. The main aim of the paper is to establish links between transition type and choice o...

Openness has become a key feature in the discourse and practice of higher education in recent years as has its potential to drive innovation in teaching and learning practices. More often this discourse refers to the processes involved in learning such as in the phrase open and distance learning. Much less attention has been paid to the processes in teaching. The advent of the internet and its ...

Resolving links between subsequent referents (e.g., the car) and open discourse roles (as in Keith drove to London yesterday. The car kept overheating) is crucial for discourse understanding. This article investigates the contribution of lexical semantic factors (e.g., that drive implies using a vehicle) as compared to more general contextual factors in the on-line resolution of such links. We ...

Conversational discourse is a cognitive and social process influenced by both discourse content and pragmatic factors, such as the participants’ prior knowledge; these factors may also affect how simulated conversations with virtual agents unfold, with implications for design. This study explored effects of question content and perceived expertise of a virtual agent on students’ interactions wi...

We describe our efforts to apply the Penn Discourse Treebank guidelines on a Tamil corpus to create an annotated corpus of discourse relations in Tamil. After conducting a preliminary exploratory study on Tamil discourse connectives, we show our observations and results of a pilot experiment that we conducted by annotating a small portion of our corpus. Our ultimate goal is to develop a Tamil D...