Document-level sentiment analysis is among the most popular research fields of nature language processing in recent years, in which one of major challenges is that discourse structural information can be hardly captured by existing approaches. In this paper, a domain-independent framework for documentlevel sentiment classification with weighting rules based on Rhetorical Structure Theory is pro...

AIMS To determine the likelihood of finding an antivaccination site on the world wide web and to characterise their explicit claims and rhetorical appeals. METHODS Using "vaccination" and "immunisation", examining the first 10 sites displayed on seven leading search engines. Detailed examination of content of 100 antivaccination sites found on Google. RESULTS 43% of websites were antivaccin...

In this paper, we propose a novel idea for applying probabilistic graphical models for automatic text summarization task related to a legal domain. Identification of rhetorical roles present in the sentences of a legal document is the important text mining process involved in this task. A Conditional Random Field (CRF) is applied to segment a given legal document into seven labeled components a...

The rhetorical classification of sentences in biomedical texts is an important task in the recognition of the components of a scientific argument. Generating supervised machine learned models to do this recognition requires corpora annotated for the rhetorical categories Introduction (or Background), Method, Result, Discussion (or Conclusion). Currently, a few, small annotated corpora exist. We...

This paper presents a corpus study of parenthetical constructions in two different corpora: the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB, (PDTBGroup, 2008)) and the RST Discourse Treebank (Carlson et al., 2001). The motivation for the study is to gain a better understanding of the rhetorical properties of parentheticals in order to enable a natural language generation system to produce parentheticals as p...

Summarization involves finding the most important information in a text in order to convey the meaning of the document. In this paper, I present a method for using topic information to influence which content is selected for a summary. Texts are divided into topics using rhetorical information that creates a partition of a text into a sequence of non-overlapping topics. To investigate the effec...

In this paper, we describe a content planning mechanism which takes into consideration a user's possible inferences in order to generate the most concise discourse that achieves a given communicative goal. The consideration of a user's inferences results in the addition of information that addresses erroneous inferences , and the omission of easily inferred information. Given a communicative go...

Linguistic annotation provides additional information asserted with a particular purpose in a document or other piece of information. It is widely used in various fields, from computing and bioinformatics, through imaging, to law and linguistics. There is also a clear distinction between what is communicated through the written/spoken natural language and how this is passed on. We are studying ...

This paper investigates whether the model of local rhetorical coherence suggested in Knott et al. (2001) can boost the performance of the Centering-based metrics of entity coherence employed by Karamanis et al. (2004) for the task of information ordering. Our results indicate that (a) the simplest metric continues to perform better than its competitors even when local rhetorical coherence is ta...

While quite a few linguistic corpora with syntactic annotations are available today, resources are scarce on the level of discourse annotation. A flexible, extendible annotation format speeds up development. We therefore propose an XML format for annotating rhetorical structure trees. In human and automatic analysis, rhetorical structure is often difficult and assigned incrementally. Thus, the ...