Studies on rhetorical features of language have reported both enhancing and adverse effects on ease of processing. We hypothesized that two explanations may account for these inconclusive findings. First, the respective gains and losses in ease of processing may apply to different dimensions of language processing (specifically, prosodic and semantic processing) and different types of fluency (...

At present, discourse parsing is an important research topic. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is one of the most popular approaches in this field. In general, discourse parsing includes three stages: discourse segmentation, discourse relations detection and building up rhetorical trees. Different strategies are used when developing discourse parsers. One of the strategies to detect discourse ...

The Department of Education (DoE) and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) are regulatory agencies in the system of accreditation that influence both the quality and reputation of colleges and universities. Recent criticism (e.g., Butler, 2012; Obama, 2013b; Weissburg, 2009; Wellman, 1998) of accreditation processes in the United States and changing legislation (i.e., DoE, 2014...

This paper presents DiZer, an automatic DIscourse analyZER for Brazilian Portuguese. Given a source text, the system automatically produces its corresponding rhetorical analysis, following Rhetorical Structure Theory – RST (Mann and Thompson, 1987). A rhetorical repository, which is DiZer main component, makes the automatic analysis possible. This repository, produced by means of a corpus analy...

Computationally modeling the evolution of science by tracking how scientific topics rise and fall over time has important implications for research funding and public policy. However, little is known about the mechanisms underlying topic growth and decline. We investigate the role of rhetorical framing: whether the rhetorical role or function that authors ascribe to topics (as methods, as goals...

Abstract in every research paper has always been functioning as an attention-grabber which can encourage readers to keep reading the research or to dissuade it. Although abstracts are believed to play an important role in distributing the research findings, few studies have been done to evaluate the rhetorical organization of thesis abstracts, especially in the field of Teaching English as a Fo...