Meta-discourse markers are an inevitable part of oral proficiency which improve both the quality and comprehension of learners’ speech. While studies of oral meta-discourse have been conducted since the 1980s in a European or US context, they have remained relatively untouched in Iran. Therefore, this study aimed to seek the impact of both explicit and implicit teaching of formal meta-discourse...

By “mediation”, we mean any moderated conflict resolution discourse, regardless of the procedures, methods or tools applied. Since mediation is a kind of discourse, it seems reasonable to assume that information and communication technology can provide some useful support. This assumption is investigated by analyzing the tasks in the standard mediation procedure and matching them with a broad s...

Discourse connectives (e.g. however, because) are terms that can explicitly convey a discourse relation within a text. While discourse connectives have been shown to be an effective clue to automatically identify discourse relations, they are not always used to convey such relations, thus they should first be disambiguated between discourse-usage and non-discourse-usage. In this paper, we inves...

Detection of discourse structure is crucial in many text-based applications. This paper presents an original framework for describing textual parallelism which allows us to generalize various discourse phenomena and to propose a unique method to recognize them. With this prospect, we discuss several methods in order to identify the most appropriate one for the problem, and evaluate them based o...

We present a cross-lingual discourse relation analysis based on a parallel corpus with discourse information available only for one language. First, we conduct a corpus study to explore differences in discourse organization between Chinese and English, including differences in information packaging, implicit/explicit discourse expression divergence, and discourse connective ambiguities. Second,...

due to the significance of multiculturalism in politics, and the central role linguistic devices play in organizing the political discourse, this text-based qualitative study was carried out to compare political interviews in the iranian and english contexts to find out the probable similarities and differences in the use of discourse markers (dms) between the two cultures. to this end, three s...

This paper presents a brief description of Explanation-Based Learning (EBL), and argues that it is an approach to machine learning with signi cant potential for use in discourse processing. More speci cally, EBL can be used by systems that model discourse generation as goaldriven behavior, and that model discourse interpretation as recognizing the speaker's discourse goals. As evidence, we desc...

Discourse relation classification is an important component for automatic discourse parsing and natural language understanding. The performance bottleneck of a discourse parser comes from implicit discourse relations, whose discourse connectives are not overtly present. Explicit discourse connectives can potentially be exploited to collect more training data to collect more data and boost the p...

The temporal order in which story events are presented in discourse can greatly impact how readers experience narrative; however, it remains unclear how narrative systems can leverage temporal order to affect comprehension and experience. We define structural properties of discourse which provide a basis for computational narratologists to reason about good timing, such as when readers learn ab...