This paper presents an approach towards the definition of a formal framework for rhetorical argumentation. Before describing the competence theory behind the framework, we introduce the notion of rhetorical argument, and describe the New Rhetoric, a well known theory in the philosophy of argumentation, upon which our work is based.

The modern world is characterised by problems that involve systems with social and physical subsystems. They are entangled systems of system of systems with multilevel dynamics. There is no methodology able to combine the partial micromesoand macro-theories that focus on subsystems into a coherent representation of the dynamics of the whole. Policy requires prediction, but the traditional defin...

I use the distinction between the nuclei and the satellites that pertain to discourse relations to introduce a compositionality criterion for discourse trees. I provide a first-order formalization of rhetorical structure trees and, on its basis, I derive an algorithm that constructs all the valid rhetorical trees that can be associated with a given discourse.

shahanshāhnāma is one of the historical epic poems composed by ahmad tabrizi at the end of the ilkhanids’ reign. at the time, the poet was not able to openly criticize the mongols. at times, one may even think that he is praising them. on the contrary, in the hidden layers of his composition, the poet tries to show his criticism by using rhetorical and linguistic tools and praising iran and ira...

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.

This paper takes on a contrarian view of Banville and Landry’s (1989) landmark article “Can the Field of MIS Be Disciplined?” Notwithstanding its valuable contribution to the discussion concerning the progress of the IS field and its considerable influence on IS research, the article’s interpretations of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and proposed model for the IS field h...

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.

Argumentative Zoning (AZ) is an analysis of the argumentative and rhetorical structure of a scientific paper. It has been shown to be reliably used by independent human coders, and has proven useful for various information access tasks. Annotation experiments have however so far been restricted to one discipline, computational linguistics (CL). Here, we present a more informative AZ scheme with...

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...