The paper contributes to the ongoing discussion on the relation between information structure and discourse structure. It presents an account of the German conjunct adverb doch (dochCA) that is based on the observation that the interaction between the two structures determines the semantic and pragmatic properties of this conjunct adverb. The account of dochCA presented thus defends a monosemic...

We present a study of aspects of discourse structure — specifically discourse devices used to organize information in a sentence — that significantly impact the quality of machine translation. Our analysis is based on manual evaluations of translations of news from Chinese and Arabic to English. We find that there is a particularly strong mismatch in the notion of what constitutes a sentence in...

this paper presents the first part of a larger study on the issue of graduate employability in malaysia as construed in public discourse in english, a language of power in malaysia. the term employability itself has many definitions depending on the requirements of government and industry, and in the case of malaysia, the english-language ability of graduates is inseparable from graduate employ...

For machine translation to tackle discourse phenomena, models must have access to extrasentential linguistic context. There has been recent interest in modelling context in neural machine translation (NMT), but models have been principally evaluated with standard automatic metrics, poorly adapted to evaluating discourse phenomena. In this article, we present hand-crafted, discourse test sets, d...

Text complexity can be reduced by making different choices at the lexical and grammatical levels. However, discourse-level choices may also affect a text’s complexity. In a coherent text, explicit discourse relations (e.g. CAUSE, CONDITION) are expressed using discourse markers (e.g. since, because, etc.) that may be preferred for texts at different readability levels. In this paper, we investi...

This paper investigates the influence of discourse features on text complexity assessment. To do so, we created two data sets based on the Penn Discourse Treebank and the Simple English Wikipedia corpora and compared the influence of coherence, cohesion, surface, lexical and syntactic features to assess text complexity. Results show that with both data sets coherence features are more correlate...

The study of discourse can be undertaken from different perspectives (e.g., linguistic, cognitive, or computational) with differing purposes in mind (e.g., to study language use or to analyze social practices). The aim of Discourse on the Move is to show that it is possible and profitable to join quantitative and qualitative analyses to study discourse structures. Whereas corpus-based quantitat...