This paper presents an automated empirical evaluation of the relationship between clausal structure and pronominal reference. Past work has theorized that incorporating discourse structure can constrain the search space in the resolution of pronouns since discourse segments, and thus potential antecedents, can be made inaccessible as the discourse progresses and the focus changes. However, very...

Existing discourse research only focuses on the monolingual languages and the inconsistency between languages limits the power of the discourse theory in multilingual applications such as machine translation. To address this issue, we design and build a bilingual discource corpus in which we are currently defining and annotating the bilingual elementary discourse units (BEDUs). The BEDUs are th...

Rhetorical Structure Theory is a theory of text organization that has led to areas of application beyond discourse analysis and text generation, its original goals. In this paper, we review the most important applications in several areas: discourse analysis, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. We also provide a list of resources useful for work within the...

Expectations about the correlation of cue phrases, the duration of unfilled pauses and the structuring of spoken discourse are framed in light of Grosz and Sidner’s theory of discourse and are tested for a directions-giving dialogue. The results suggest that cue phrase and discourse structuring tasks may align, and show a correlation for pause length and some of the modifications that speakers ...

In this paper, I argue that animal domestication, speciesism, and other modern human-animal interactions in North America are possible because of and through the erasure of Indigenous bodies and the emptying of Indigenous lands for settler-colonial expansion. That is, we cannot address animal oppression or talk about animal liberation without naming and subsequently dismantling settler colonial...

Nowadays discourse parsing is a very prominent research topic. However, there is not a discourse parser for Spanish texts. The first stage in order to develop this tool is discourse segmentation. In this work, we present DiSeg, the first discourse segmenter for Spanish that uses the framework of the Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988) and is based on lexical and syntactic rule...

Functional specialization, or division of labour (DOL), of parts within organisms and colonies is common in most multi-cellular, colonial and social organisms, but it is far from ubiquitous. Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain the evolutionary origins of DOL; the basic feature common to all of them is that functional differences can arise easily. These mechanisms cannot explain the...

Social media platforms and services have rapidly grown into an important societal phenomenon, lately also with increased impact on business. The relative novelty of its occurrence in a business context, the lack of well-grounded best practice and the scarcity of research, result in organizational decision-makers having to rely on vendor descriptions and trade press articles to make sense of soc...

We propose a new formalism for discourse, called D-STAG, which is inspired by SDRT as a discourse theory and which is akin to D-LTAG as a formalism which extends a sentential TAG syntax/semantic interface to the discourse level.

Environmental justice principles are widespread at national and global levels of transition discourse, but this is sometimes irrelevant to marginalized communities. To address issue, we apply environmental theory a participatory postcolonial urban case study where poverty, unemployment inequality continue incentivize unregulated exploitation vulnerable environments people. It unclear how legisl...