We have compiled a corpus of 80 Dutch texts from expository and persuasive genres, which we annotated for rhetorical and genre-specific discourse structure, and lexical cohesion with the goal of creating a gold standard for further research. The annotations are based on a segmentation of the text in elementary discourse units that takes into account cues from syntax and punctuation. During the ...

The Word Wide Web is a continuous challenge to machine learning. Established approaches have to be enhanced and new methods be developed in order to tackle the problem of finding and organising relevant information. It has often been motivated that semantic classifications of input documents help solving this task. But while approaches of supervised text categorisation perform quite well on gen...

Readability assessment can play a role in the evaluation of a simplification algorithm as well as in the identification of what to simplify. While some previous research used traditional readability formulas to evaluate text simplification, there is little research into the utility of readability assessment for identifying and analyzing sentence level targets for text simplification. We explore...

Successful academic writing courses include self-assessment opportunities for foreign language learners. Encouraging students to actively engage with their own texts is even more relevant when are offered in a hybrid or entirely online learning environment. During distance education, measuring becoming problematic, reflecting on and experimenting work can inform the teacher, but importantly, pr...

Automatic summarization of open-domain spoken dialogues is a relatively new research area. This article introduces the task and the challenges involved and motivates and presents an approach for obtaining automatic-extract summaries for human transcripts of multiparty dialogues of four different genres, without any restriction on domain. We address the following issues, which are intrinsic to s...

Abstract The planners uh and um fulfil a range of interpersonal discursive functions, akin to other pragmatic markers. Although there appear be differences between the planners’ functions across genres, factors influencing these have not been analysed comprehensively so far. In our study, we analyse frequency three different genres: spontaneous conversation, scripted dialogues in television ser...

This paper reviews models of the cognitive processes involved in writing. It sketches their development from an early emphasis on the thinking behind the text and the impact of cognitive overload on this, through more dynamic models emphasizing the interaction between thinking and text production processes, to more recent models emphasizing the constitutive role of text production in the develo...

Conditional random fields were trained to detect marker words for negation and speculation in two corpora belonging to two very different domains: clinical text and consumer review text. For the corpus of clinical text, marker words for speculation and negation were detected with results in line with previously reported interannotator agreement scores. This was also the case for speculation mar...

The occurrence of syntactic phenomena such as coordination and subordination is characteristic of long, complex sentences. Text simplification systems need to detect and categorise constituents in order to generate simpler sentences. These constituents are typically bounded or linked by signs of syntactic complexity, which include conjunctions, complementisers, whwords, and punctuation marks. T...