This paper addresses semantic ellipsis control in language generation for humancomputer dialogue. For this, the rhetorical structure of the dialogue is used, as well as a repository of facts that are accepted by the recipient of the utterance. Rhetorical structure is represented in the framework of SDRT, where rhetorical relations are grouped in “confirmation” and “contradiction” relations; the...

In this paper, we present a prototype that helps visualizing the relative importance of sentences extracted from medical texts using Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA). We propose to map rhetorical structures automatically recognized in the documents onto a set of communicative acts controlling the expression of an ECA. As a consequence, the ECA will dramatize a sentence to reflect its percei...

We present an annotation effort that involves adding a new layer of annotation to an existing corpus. We are interested in how rhetorical relations are signalled in discourse, and thus begin with a corpus already annotated for rhetorical relations, to which we add signalling information. We show that a very large number of relations carry signals that can help identify them as such. The detaile...

We present a tagging schema and a tagging tool for labeling the rhetorical structure of texts. We focus on presenting the difficulties that we faced in designing a discourse annotation manual and on discussing the choices that we made in order to address these difficulties. We report reliability results concerning our agreement on building the rhetorical structure of 90 texts of three genres: 3...

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...

Legal argumentation can be modeled using logic, but in this chapter it is claimed that logic alone does not suffice. A model should also take the rhetoric nature of legal argumentation into account. DiaLaw is such a model: a formal, procedural model in which the logical and rhetorical aspects of argumentation are combined. The core of this chapter consists of a description of the basic concepts...

RASTA (Rhetorical Structure Theory Analyzer), a discourse analysis component within the Microsoft English Grammar, efficiently computes representations of the structure of written discourse using information available in syntactic and logical form analyses. RASTA heuristically scores the rhetorical relations that it hypothesizes, using those scores to guide it in producing more plausible discou...

Scott and Souza have posed the problem of how a rhetorical structure in which proposi tions are linked by rhetorical relations but not yet arranged in a linear order can be realized by a text structure in which propositions are ordered and linked up by appropriate discourse connectives Almost all work on this problem assumes implicitly or explicitly that this map ping is governed by a constrain...

This paper addresses discourse structure from the perspective of understanding. It would perhaps help us understand the na,ture of discourse relatiolls il" we better understood what units of a text. can be related to one a.nother. In Olle ma.jor theory of discourse structure, Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann &: Thompson 1988; Imrea.l'ter simply RS'T), the smallest possible linguistic units tha...

In this paper, we propose a Connectivedriven Dependency Tree (CDT) scheme to represent the discourse rhetorical structure in Chinese language, with elementary discourse units as leaf nodes and connectives as non-leaf nodes, largely motivated by the Penn Discourse Treebank and the Rhetorical Structure Theory. In particular, connectives are employed to directly represent the hierarchy of the tree...