What is the prosodic mechanism of faster or slower discourse speech? This paper focuses on observing the effects of speech rate on discourse prosody of Standard Chinese speech with fast, normal and slow speech rates. The investigation in discourse prosody structure demonstrates that the speaking rate effects on discourse prosody are nonlinear and need careful manipulations.

In Rhetorical Structure Theory, discourse units participate in asymmetric relationships, with one element acting as the nucleus and the other as the satellite. In the resulting tree-like nuclearity structure, the importance of each discourse unit can be measured by the number of relations in which it acts as the nucleus or as the satellite. Existing approaches to automatically parsing such stru...

This paper describes how well prosodic information correlates with the topic structure of a cooperative dialogue. To investigate this correlation systematically, rst we introduce the notion of utterance unit (UU) as a basic unit in conversations. We de ne the utterance unit by employing four principles. The Grammatical Principle is a syntactical criterion and the UU boundary is set wherever the...

We propose a robust answer reranking model for non-factoid questions that integrates lexical semantics with discourse information, driven by two representations of discourse: a shallow representation centered around discourse markers, and a deep one based on Rhetorical Structure Theory. We evaluate the proposed model on two corpora from different genres and domains: one from Yahoo! Answers and ...

this essay examines the practice of free indirect discourse (fid), as a narrative-stylistic device, in hossein sanapour’s lips on a blade (2010). after a brief overview of the novel ’s narrative structure, the four modes of representing characters’ discourses in narrative fiction are introduced and exemplified. among these modes, fid is the most important since it is the only one which leads to...

Given a recording of a lecture, one cannot easily locate a topic of interest, or skim for important points. However, by presenting the user with a summary of a discourse, listening to speech can be made more efficient. One approach to the problem of summarizing and skimming speech has been termed "emphasis detection." This study evaluates an emphasis detection approach by comparing the speech s...

We present in this paper the development process and the evaluation procedure of a Brazilian Portuguese discourse parser called DiZer. Based on Rhetorical Structure Theory, DiZer is a symbolic cue phrase-based analyzer that makes use of discourse templates learned from a corpus of scientific texts to identify and build the discourse structure of texts. DiZer evaluation shows satisfactory result...

As already mentioned, most machine translation systems perform translation sentence by sentence. But even in the case of paragraph translation, the discourse structure of the target text tends to be identical to that of the source text. However, the sublanguage discourse structures may differ across the different languages, and thus a translated text which assumes the same discourse structure a...

A proper assessment of the relation between discourse structure and speaker's communicat ive intentions requires a better understanding of communicative intentions. This contribution proposes that there is a crucial difference between intending the hearer to entertain a certain belief (or desire, or intention), and intending to affect the strength with which the hearer entertains the belief (or...