This paper describes our submission (kosseim15) to the CoNLL-2015 shared task on shallow discourse parsing. We used the UIMA framework to develop our parser and used ClearTK to add machine learning functionality to the UIMA framework. Overall, our parser achieves a result of 17.3 F1 on the identification of discourse relations on the blind CoNLL-2015 test set, ranking in sixth place.

The present study aimed to identify strategies used to realize the speech act of offerin Persian. To do so, 195 male and female native Persian speakers were selected fromdiverse age ranges, educational backgrounds, and social classes, and were assigned a36-item Discourse Completion Task (DCT) to elicit the speech act of offer. Thirtyfield workers also recorded naturally occurring interactions c...

Using Spencer-Oatey’s (2004, 2008) Rapport Management approach, this study was conducted to elicit the reprimanding response behavior of native Persian speakers and EFL Learners. The participants of this study were 30 native Persian speakers and 60 EFL learners. To fulfill the purposes of this study, a six-binary situation Interactive Discourse Completion (IDCT) Task was utilized. Emotion Liker...

L+H* is claimed to evoke contrast between discourse entities in English. To test whether this prominent accent projects a contrastive relation for the discourse foreground, spontaneous continuations of short stories were examined. For both subject and object positions, participants mentioned contrastive alternatives more often when the corresponding discourse entity was introduced with L+H* in ...

Coh-Metrix is a linguistic tool used by many researchers to quickly measure cohesion and coherence of text. Because it is a free, easy to use, and quite efficient linguistic tool, it is widely used in academic research and analysis. The results of many of these studies are dependent on the accuracy of the Coh-Metrix tool. I will be testing the accuracy of CohMetrix, focusing on its analysis of ...

The present research is aimed at investigating how the politeness of the speakers of Urdu is influenced by their relative social status in society. The researcher took politeness theory of Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) as a model. To observe politeness of Urdu speakers, speech act of apology with different strategies was selected. A Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was used as an instrument to...

Using Spencer-Oatey’s (2004, 2008) Rapport Management approach, this study was conducted to elicit the reprimanding response behavior of native Persian speakers and EFL Learners. The participants of this study were 30 native Persian speakers and 60 EFL learners. To fulfill the purposes of this study, a six-binary situation Interactive Discourse Completion (IDCT) Task was utilized. Emotion Liker...

This paper reports on the findings of a study designed to investigate the cultural and social complexities governing the compliment responses among the Persian native speakers. 200 Persian respondents took a 24-item Discourse Completion Task (DCT) while 15 native field workers were also set responsible for collecting the examples of complimenting exchanges they either observed or participated i...

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...

This study aims to test quantitatively whether lled pauses (FPs) may highlight discourse structure. More speci cally, it is rst investigated whether FPs are more typical in the vicinity of major discourse boundaries. Secondly, the FPs are analyzed acoustically, to check whether those occurring at major discourse boundaries are segmentally and prosodically di erent from those at shallower breaks...