This study aimed at investigating the impact of writing on Iranian EFL college students’ rhetorical organization. Thirty Iranian female undergraduate students majoring in English at Al-zahra University participated in the current study. The writing instructions included two stages, each lasting for four weeks. The participants were assigned to a control group and an experimental group according...

In order to develop an understanding of the rhetorical conventions in the Persian language and to find out the metadiscursive cultural norms of Iranian writers in their native language writings, it is necessary to probe into the implicit rhetorical features of academic writing which has so far eluded a comprehensive systematic characterization. Metadiscourse marking, which is supposed to be one...

This paper introduces the first Basque discourse TreeBank annotated with rhetorical relations following Rhetorical Structure Theory. We report the main features of the corpus, such as the annotation criteria, inter-annotator agreement and harmonization procedure. We describe an online search system to check the annotation of discourse relations.

In this paper we report on several issues arising out of a first attempt to annotate task-oriented spoken dialog for rhetorical structure using Rhetorical Structure Theory. We discuss an annotation scheme we are developing to resolve the difficulties we have encountered.

We derive the rhetorical structures of texts by means of two new, surface-form-based algorithms: one that identifies discourse usages of cue phrases and breaks sentences into clauses, and one that produces valid rhetorical structure trees for unrestricted natural language texts. The algorithms use information that was derived from a corpus analysis of cue phrases.

Rhetorical moves are a useful framework for analyzing the hidden rhetorical organization in research papers, in teaching academic writing. We propose a ∗ 國立清華大學資工系 NTHU NLPLAB Email: {cheng, hsiang, joe}@nlplab.cc; [email protected]; [email protected]

Derivations in the minimalist programm (MP) frequently encounter competition between elementary operations. A way in MP to resolve such competitions is to assume preference principles, the most prominent being “Merge before Move” (Chomsky 2000). Assmann, Georgi et al. (2013) discuss competition between Agree and Move. ere, either Agree must be procrastinated in favor of Move or the other way ro...

Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are known to be licensed in wh-questions. But not all wh-questions behave alike with respect to NPI licensing. As pointed out in Han and Siegel (1996), while all argument wh-questions with NPIs can have a RHETORICAL QUESTION reading, only a subset of them can have a true wh-question reading. In this paper, we point out that adjunct wh-questions with NPIs cannot ha...

Progressive Pruning (PP) is used in the Monte-Carlo go playing program Indigo. For each candidate move, PP launches random games starting with this move. PP gathers statistics on moves, and it prunes moves statistically inferior to the best one [5]. This papers yields two new pruning techniques: Miai Pruning (MP) and Set Pruning (SP). In MP the second move of the random games is selected at ran...

In this paper, we propose the necessity to expand the concept of semiformal systems in collaborative environments. We have through extensive empirical work identified a number of salient dimensions that points towards need of broaden the space of possible actions for the users. The complexity of collaborative processes and the trend of increased use of mobile technologies have been concretized ...