The IMAGENE project has studied the expression of actions in the context of instructional text generation. The approach employs a rather traditional interpretation of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) (Mann and Thompson, 1989), using it both as a descriptive tool and as a constructive tool (Mann and Thompson, 1987). No explicit representation of and reasoning about intentions was employed. In t...

This paper introduces a new algorithm to parse discourse within the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Our method is based on recent advances in the field of statistical machine learning (multivariate capabilities of Support Vector Machines) and a rich feature space. RST offers a formal framework for hierarchical text organization with strong applications in discourse analysis and ...

Class of 2008 Political Science The author examines visual and rhetorical strategies used by Iraqi and non-Iraqi groups in recruiting voters for the January 2005 legislative and presidential elections. Case studies include the USAID, various Shiite clergy groups, and Future Iraq Assembly, which is a non-governmental organization of activists, businesspeople, and academicians. Religious appeals ...

Empirical studies of text coherence often use tree-like structures in the spirit of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) as representational device. This paper identifies several sources of ambiguity in RST-inspired trees and argues that such structures are therefore not as explanatory as a text representation should be. As an alternative, an approach toward multi-level annotation (MLA) of texts i...

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...

In recent times, there has been an increase in the number of Natural Language Generation systems that take into consideration a user's inferences. The statements generated by these systems are typically connected by inferential links, which are opportunistic in nature. In this paper, we describe a discourse structuring mechanism which organizes inferentially linked statements as well as stateme...

Design documentation is costly, often inconsistent, and generally incomplete. Active Documents offer an active approach to capturing and delivering design rationale. In ADD, an existing implementation of an active document, what is stored and manipulated by system and user is not just information, but knowledge. Delivering knowledge at the interface level is a complex task, involving communicat...

In this paper, I argue that a key problem for understanding the social ramifications of software is an implicit separation of software programs into two separate elements: expressive aspects which are seen as socially driven and affectual, and functional aspects understood as scientific and rational. In order to overcome this binary, I develop an alternative framework that examines the ways sof...

Storytelling models are usually constrained to the applications they are implemented in because of the particular characteristics of the data used to define story events and the way those events are linked. In order to develop a more generic model to create storytelling applications, we need to focus the solution not on the data itself, but on the manner this data, in the form of events, is org...

In recent times, there has been an increase in the number of Natural Language Generation systems that take into consideration a user’s inferences. The statements generated by these systems are typically connected by inferential links, which are opportunistic in nature. In this paper, we describe a discourse structuring mechanism which organizes inferentially linked statements as well as stateme...