This study aims to investigate the apology speech act strategy employed by Japanese language learners at intermediate level and pragmatic transfer from L1 L2 that occurs. The data for this were gathered using Discourse Completion Test (DCT), which examined four situations focusing on relationships with interlocutors. subjects of 53 learners. collected then classified into eight strategies or se...

The use of politeness strategies can help interlocutors promote and/or maintain social harmony in telephone interactions. Using the Rapport Management Model proposed by Spencer-Oatey (2008), this study aimed primarily to reinvestigate the closing structures of telephone conversation (hereafter abbreviated as TC) in Persian and to discover the common politeness strategies used by native Persian ...

1 Abstract In developing lexicons to support a scoring system for open-ended test questions and a content analysis system, we found it necessary to extend the conventional notion of a semantic network as consisting of concept nodes and (perhaps several kinds of) labeled links by adding nodes for pseudoentries capturing semantic features (as in typed feature structures) and by viewing links as n...

The present study is targeted to investigate how pitch reset as a boundary correlate functions in indicating structural information in discourse for listeners. Two experiments were conducted: one was a boundary detection test, and the other was a boundary hierarchy rating test. Results of both experiments indicated that listeners indeed rely on the presence and the strength of pitch reset in de...

This study proposes a computational model of the discourse segments in lyrics to understand and to model the structure of lyrics. To test our hypothesis that discourse segmentations in lyrics strongly correlate with repeated patterns, we conduct the first large-scale corpus study on discourse segments in lyrics. Next, we propose the task to automatically identify segment boundaries in lyrics an...

Discourse relations between text segments can be explicitly marked using discourse connectors (e.g., because), but by far not all discourse relations are marked explicitly. However, people are usually able to infer the intended relation. What kinds of cues do people rely on? Could they in principle use structural cues from the preceding discourse to anticipate upcoming discourse relations? This...

Current approaches to sentiment analysis assume that the sole discourse function of sentiment-bearing texts is expressivity. However, the persuasive discourse function also utilises expressive language. In this work, we present the results of training supervised classifiers on a new corpus of clinical texts that contain documents with an expressive discourse function, and we test the learned mo...

Discourse relations can be categorized as continuous or discontinuous in the hypothesis of continuity (Murray, 1997), with continuous relations expressing normal succession of events in discourse such as temporal, spatial or causal. Asr and Demberg (2013) propose a markedness measure to test the prediction that discontinuous relations may have more unambiguous connectives, but restrict the mark...

In this paper we present a corpus study and a sentence completion experiment designed to evaluate the discourse prominence of entities evoked in relative clauses. The corpus study shows a preference for referring expressions after a sentence final relative clause to select a matrix clause entity as their antecedents. In the sentence completion experiment, we evaluated the potential effect of he...

We study dependencies between discourse structure and speech recognition problems (SRP) in a corpus of speech-based computer tutoring dialogues. This analysis can inform us whether there are places in the discourse structure prone to more SRP. We automatically extract the discourse structure by taking advantage of how the tutoring information is encoded in our system. To quantify the discourse ...