While the global discourse structure that describes how utterances are grouped into larger units of discourse has received much attention both in oral and in computermediated dialogues, the local structure (i. e. the structure of individual utterances) of chat conversations has not been previously studied in a psycholinguistic perspective. In this paper we explore some evidence of cognitive pro...

Underspecification-based algorithms for processing partially disambiguated discourse structure must cope with extremely high numbers of readings. Based on previous work on dominance graphs and weighted tree grammars, we provide the first possibility for computing an underspecified discourse description and a best discourse representation efficiently enough to process even the longest discourses...

The alternative to be outlined provides a proposal to solve a central problem in research on discourse structure and discourse coherence, namely, as pointed out by many authors, that of the relationship between linguistic and intentional structure, or, in other words, between subject matter and presentational relations (Mann and Thompson 1988) or informational and intentional relations (Moore a...

Textual coherence versus discourse structure Coherence is one of the most general and most widely discussed concepts in the study of text and discourse In spite or perhaps because of its central status the concept of coherence has many di erent and often incompatible de nitions and connotations For text linguistics or psycholinguistics with their focus on the representation and processing of in...

The idea of contrast plays an important role in the analysis of information structure and discourse structure. In the literature on information structure, we encounter the concept of contrastive focus and of contrastive topic, and there is also the opinion that focus in general establishes a contrast. In the literature on discourse structure, it is commonly held that there is a discourse relati...

This paper aims at proposing a cognitive structure for discourse deixis, in terms of which deixis is understood and used to structure reality, so that reality is internally experienced and hence reproduced or changed. The paper also tries to argue that discourse deixis is metaphorically derived from place deixis. This analysis is consistent with and confirms the spatialization-of-form hypothesi...

This paper deals with the way temporal connectives affect Temporal Structure as well as Discourse Structure in Narratives. It presents a contrastive study of French connectives puis (then, afterwards) and un peu plus tard (a bit later) within the framework of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. It shows that puis is a marker of the Narration discourse relation, whereas un peu plus tard b...

We propose a unified model of syntax and discourse in which text structure is viewed as a tree structure augmented with anaphoric relations and other secondary relations. We describe how the model accounts for discourse connectives and the syntax-discourse-semantics interface. Our model is dependency-based, ie, words are the basic building blocks in our analyses. The analyses have been applied ...

Discourse markers foreshadow the message thrust of texts and saliently guide their rhetorical structure which are important for content filtering and text abstraction. This paper reports on efforts to automatically identify and classify discourse markers in Chinese texts using heuristic-based and corpus-based data-mining methods, as an integral part of automatic text summarization via rhetorica...

We conducted an empirical analysis into the relation between control and discourse structure. We applied control criteria to four dialogues and identified 3 levels of discourse structure. We investigated the mechanism for changing control between these structures and found that utterance type and not cue words predicted shifts of control. Participants used certain types of signals when discours...