Although we define textual cohesion as a pragmatic characteristic, its dependence on grammar is obvious. Ángel Herrero defines it as follows: "A set of linguistic mechanisms used by a text to ensure the explicit cohesion of its parts. Cohesion enables the linguistic interpretation of an element in the text (a morpheme, a word, a construction) to take place thanks to other elements in the same t...

Lexical cohesion is a property of text, achieved through lexicalsemantic relations between words in text. Most information retrieval systems make use of lexical relations in text only to a limited extent. In this paper we empirically investigate whether the degree of lexical cohesion between the contexts of query terms' occurrences in a document is related to its relevance to the query. Experim...

We examined young readers’ comprehension as a function of text genre (narrative, science), text cohesion (high, low), and readers’ abilities (reading decoding skills and world knowledge). The overarching purpose of this study was to contribute to our understanding of the fourth grade slump. Children in grade 4 read four texts, including one high and one low cohesion text from each genre. Compre...

The paper proposes a new method of linear text segmentation based on lexical cohesion of a text. Namely, first a single chain of disambiguated words in a text is established, then the rips of this single chain are considered as boundaries for the segments of the cohesion text structure (Cohesion TextTiling or CTT). The summaries of arbitrarily length are obtained by extraction using three diffe...

Automatic text summarization is a growing field due to the modern world’s Internet based society, but to automatically create perfect summaries is not easy, and cohesion errors are common. By the usage of an eye tracking camera, this thesis studies the nature of four different types of cohesion errors occurring in summaries. A total of 23 participants read and rated four different texts and mar...

We are compiling a corpus of Dutch texts annotated with discourse structure and lexical cohesion, containing initially 80 texts from expository and persuasive genres. We are using this resource for corpus-based studies of discourse relations, discourse markers, cohesion, and genre differences. We are also exploring the possibilities of automatic text segmentation and semi-automatic discourse an...

This study explored the effect of text cohesion on reading comprehension of challenging science texts among students with little topic-relevant knowledge. Introductory level psychology students, considered to have a low level of knowledge on the topic, read high and low cohesion versions of biology texts. After reading the texts, their comprehension of the texts was assessed with text-based or ...

An important topic in writing research has been the use of cohesive features. Much of this research has focused on local and text cohesion. The few studies that have studied global cohesion have been restricted to first language writing. This study investigates the development of local, global, and text cohesion in the writing of 57 s language (L2) university students and examines the effects o...