In order to develop an understanding of the rhetorical conventions in the Persian language and to find out the metadiscursive cultural norms of Iranian writers in their native language writings, it is necessary to probe into the implicit rhetorical features of academic writing which has so far eluded a comprehensive systematic characterization. Metadiscourse marking, which is supposed to be one...

This paper introduces the first Basque discourse TreeBank annotated with rhetorical relations following Rhetorical Structure Theory. We report the main features of the corpus, such as the annotation criteria, inter-annotator agreement and harmonization procedure. We describe an online search system to check the annotation of discourse relations.

In this paper we report on several issues arising out of a first attempt to annotate task-oriented spoken dialog for rhetorical structure using Rhetorical Structure Theory. We discuss an annotation scheme we are developing to resolve the difficulties we have encountered.

We derive the rhetorical structures of texts by means of two new, surface-form-based algorithms: one that identifies discourse usages of cue phrases and breaks sentences into clauses, and one that produces valid rhetorical structure trees for unrestricted natural language texts. The algorithms use information that was derived from a corpus analysis of cue phrases.

Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are known to be licensed in wh-questions. But not all wh-questions behave alike with respect to NPI licensing. As pointed out in Han and Siegel (1996), while all argument wh-questions with NPIs can have a RHETORICAL QUESTION reading, only a subset of them can have a true wh-question reading. In this paper, we point out that adjunct wh-questions with NPIs cannot ha...

Attentional State Theory and Rhetorical Structure Theory are two predominant theories of discourse parsing. Combining these two approaches, in this paper, we describe a novel approach for discourse parsing. The resulting discourse tree structure retains following properties: structure of purpose from Attentional State Theory and relations between sentences from Rhetorical Structure Theory. We d...