This paper presents and motivates a methodology for conducting semantic fieldwork on languages of the Americas. I first argue that one cannot gather adequate information about meaning from spontaneous discourse alone. Thus, direct elicitation (including asking consultants for judgments) is an indispensable methodological tool. I then present more detailed methodological suggestions. I offer tec...

The work presented in this paper attempts to evaluate and quantify the use of discourse relations in the context of blog summarization and compare their use to more traditional and factual texts. Specifically, we measured the usefulness of 6 discourse relations namely comparison, contingency, illustration, attribution, topic-opinion, and attributive for the task of text summarization from blogs...

We propose a new robust two-step approach to cross-textual event coreference resolution on news articles. The approach makes explicit use of event and discourse structure thereby compensating for implications of the Gricean Maxim of quantity. News follows the principle of language economy. Information tends not to be repeated within discourse boarders. This phenomenon poses a challenge for mode...

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...

Given the growing amount of resources developed in the NLP community, it is crucial to exploit as much as possible annotated data and tools across different research domains. Past works on discourse analysis have been conducted in parallel with research on semantic inference and, although the two fields of study are intertwined, there have been only few initiatives to put them into relation. Ou...

The formalising of relations of the theory of relational databases encompasses in the main conventional entity set models and data structures. There is an analytical vehicle and formal definition of knowledge bases. The offered tool of meta-textual relational models of knowledge opens broad capabilities of development of the theory of relational knowledge bases. The basic fields of application:...

This study explores how prosodic information can be used in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). A system was built which automatically identifies topic boundaries in a corpus of broadcast radio news. We evaluate the effectiveness of different types of features, including textual, durational, F0, Tilt and ToBI features in that system. These features were suggested by a review of the literature o...

The exploitation of the discourse structure of a text and the identification of the discourse categories are essential elements for the automatic summarization, as well as for the textual information retrieval. In this paper we will describe an automatic summarization strategy that uses these elements as the basis for the extraction of the most relevant textual segments that will constitute the...