This paper proposes a new framework for discourse analysis, in the spirit of Grosz and Sid-ner (1986), Webber (1987a,b) but differentiated with respect to the type or genre of discourse. It is argued that different genres call for different representations and processing strategies; particularly important is the distinction between subjective, pefformative discourse and objective discourse, of ...

In the last decade, members of the computational linguistics community have adopted a perspective on discourse based primarily on either Rhetorical Structure Theory or Grosz and Sidner’s Theory. However, only recently, researchers have started to investigate the relationship between the two perspectives. In this paper, we use Moser and Moore’s (1996) work as a departure point for extending Marc...

In the last decade, members of the computational linguistics community have adopted a perspective on discourse based primarily on either Rhetorical Structure Theory or Grosz and Sidner’s Theory. However, only recently, researchers have started to investigate the relationship between the two perspectives. In this paper, we use Moser and Moore’s [1996] work as a departure point for extending our ...

This paper develops an analysis of the temporal role of negative sentences in narrative discourse in Etigfati and French. The analysis focuses on differences in the aspectual systems of English and French, and their consequences for the interpretation of negation and quantification. A recursive rule for the introduction of discourse referents characterizes both quantificational and negated sequ...

HA, EUN YOUNG. Modeling Discourse Structure and Temporal Event Relations for Automated Document Summarization with Markov Logic Networks. (Under the direction of James C. Lester.) Recent years have seen significant progress in natural language processing. A key challenge posed by many natural language applications ranging from text summarization to question answering and machine translation is ...

This paper studies how subjectivity in capitalist culture can be characterized. Building on Lacan's later seminars XVI, XVII, XVIII, and XIX, the author first outlines Lacan's general discourse theory, which includes four characteristic discourses: the discourse of the master, the discourse of the university, the discourse of the hysteric and the discourse of the analyst. Next, the author explo...

Despite the central role that argumentation plays in human communication, the computational linguistics community has paid relatively little attention in proposing a methodology for automatically identifying arguments and their relations in texts. Argumentation is intimately related with discourse structure, since an argument often spans more than one phrase, forming thus an entity with its own...

We have compiled a corpus of 80 Dutch texts from expository and persuasive genres, which we annotated for rhetorical and genre-specific discourse structure, and lexical cohesion with the goal of creating a gold standard for further research. The annotations are based on a segmentation of the text in elementary discourse units that takes into account cues from syntax and punctuation. During the ...

We describe an investigation aimed at furthering the understanding of how speakers communicate discourse structural information using intonational features. We used the read and spontaneous speech of two speakers from the Boston Directions Corpus (BDC) to automatically identify elements of discourse structure based on intonational features. Unlike previous acoustic-prosodic analyses of discours...

The identification of discourse units is an essential step in discourse parsing, the automatic construction of a discourse structure from a text. We present a rule-based algorithm to identify elementary discourse units (EDUs) in Dutch written text. Contrary to approaches that focus on the determination of segment boundaries, we identify complete discourse units, which is especially helpful for ...