Most text displays an internal coherence structure, which can be analyzed as a tree structure of relations that hold between short segments of text. We present a machine-learning governed approach to such an analysis in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory. Our rhetorical analyzer observes a variety of textual properties, such as cue phrases, part-of-speech information, rhetorical conte...

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...

Counterterrorist state forces and terrorist insurgents compete to control not only territory and populations but language. The success of counterterrorism, therefore, hinges crucially on representational practices. Defeating terrorism in the long run requires both undermining the legitimacy of political violence and its purveyors and opening space for the pursuit of a less violent but still leg...

Rhetorical structuring is field approached mostly by research in natural language (pragmatic) interpretation. However, in natural language generation (NLG) the rhetorical structure plays an important part, in monologues and dialogues as well. Hence, several approaches in this direction exist. In most of these, the rhetorical structure is calculated and built in the framework of Rhetorical Struc...

Text summarization based on rhetorical structure theory has shown extremely interesting result. The process of extracting the text summary from the result of the rhetorical parser is not a singleton. Different rhetorical structure trees are generated from one text. Unfortunately, the result of the generated summary is not equivalent for those trees, and the correctness of the result is affected...

This paper describes a study of the levels at which different rhetorical relations occur in rhetorical structure trees. In a previous empirical study (Williams and Reiter, 2003) of the RST-DT (Rhetorical Structure Theory Discourse Treebank) Corpus (Carlson et al., 2003), we noticed that certain rhetorical relations tended to occur more frequently at higher levels in a rhetorical structure tree,...

This paper examines the role of complexity in descriptions of the aetiology of common psychiatric disorders. While scientists attest to the discovery of an underlying reality of complex inheritance – the so called 'witches' brew' of genetic and non-genetic factors – we argue that 'complexity' also performs rhetorical work. In our analysis of scientific review articles (1999-2008), we find a rel...

BACKGROUND Specialist palliative care nurses have considerable expertise in pain management and this expertise can contribute to tension in the boundary between specialist nurses and non-specialist doctors. OBJECTIVES This article reports on how specialist palliative care nurses contribute to team talk about pain and the rhetorical strategies they use to develop their reputation and credibili...

The paper presents RetFig, a formal domain ontology of rhetorical figures for Serbian. This ontology is one of the necessary steps in developing tools for Natural Language Processing in the Serbian language, especially for tools pertinent to discourse analysis, sentiment analysis and opinion mining. The RetFig ontology was developed taking into account a plethora of rhetorical figures in the mo...