This paper presents an augmented context free grammar which describes important features of the surface structure and the semantics of discourse in a formal way, integrating new as well as previously existing insights into a unified framework. The structures covered include lists, narratives, subordinating and coordinating rhetorical relations, topic chains and interruptions. The paper discusse...

RDF is the representation of the Semantic Web. When querying RDF documents, the result is a sub-graph of RDF data model or a number of triple statements. In this paper, we apply natural language generation technique to render the result into multi-sentential text for human comprehension. We investigate the effect of discourse segmentation on the generation of anaphora and punctuation marks in C...

We describe a method for analysing the temporal structure of a discourse which takes into account the eeects of tense, aspect, temporal adverbials and rhetorical structure and which minimises unnecessary ambiguity in the temporal structure. It is part of a discourse grammar implemented in Carpenter's ale formalism. The method for building up the temporal structure of the discourse combines cons...

The availability of the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) Discourse Treebank has spurred substantial research into discourse analysis of written texts; however, limited research has been conducted to date on RST annotation and parsing of spoken language, in particular, nonnative spontaneous speech. Considering that the measurement of discourse coherence is typically a key metric in human scorin...

A number of systems have been developed for discourse generation that use hierarchical planning techniques to generate discourse plans [Appelt 1983,Cawsey 1993,Maybury 1992,Hovy 1991,Moore and Paris 1993]. These plan-based approaches provide various solutions to the problems of content and structure determination: what communicative acts should appear in a discourse plan, what are the relations...

Narrative generation enables a range of opportunities for understanding the creative act of storytelling. Prior approaches have mostly converged on a pipeline model, wherein story structure is generated as a precursor to discourse structure, mapping individual story events to discourse elements. This model, however, unnecessarily limits narrative possibilities, which most prior work avoids by i...

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 ...

Clauses and sentences rarely stand on their own in an actual discourse; rather, the relationship between them carries important information that allows the discourse to express a meaning as a whole beyond the sum of its individual parts. Rhetorical analysis seeks to uncover this coherence structure. In this article, we present CODRA— a COmplete probabilistic Discriminative framework for perform...

One of the main motivations for studying discourse structure is its effect on the search for the antecedents of anaphoric expressions. We tested the predictions in this regard of theories assuming that the structure of a discourse depends on its intentional structure, such as Grosz and Sidner's theory. We used a corpus of tutorial dialogues independently annotated according to Relational Discou...

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...