PENG Light is a controlled natural language designed to write unambiguous specifications that can be translated automatically via discourse representation structures into a formal target language. Instead of writing axioms in a formal language, an author writes a specification and the associated background axioms directly in controlled natural language. In this paper, we first review the contro...

Litman and Allen are concerned with the relationship between plan recognition in discourse and the underlying commonsense structures that are necessary to support the discourse. Building around a train-trip scenario, they demonstrate the importance of commonsense understanding of plans to the ability to analyze a discourse revolving around this plan. In this capacity they make the distinction b...

In this paper, we present a novel approach for identifying argumentative discourse structures in persuasive essays. The structure of argumentation consists of several components (i.e. claims and premises) that are connected with argumentative relations. We consider this task in two consecutive steps. First, we identify the components of arguments using multiclass classification. Second, we clas...

I show that the semantic structure for discourses, understood as a dependency representation, can be mathematically characterized as DAGs, but these DAGs present heavy structural constraints. The argumentation is based on a simple case, i.e. discourses with three clauses and two discourse connectives. I show that only four types of DAGs are needed for these discourses.

WAR as a vehicle and Sport Is War as a conceptual metaphor (CM) seem inadequate to account metaphorically for SPORT. To cater for an inclusive vehicle/CM, we selected WIN and LOSS lexicon from the news coverage of Brazil’s football team loss to Germany and tested them through the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Then, the data were studied through the 3 stages of metaphor research. In t...

This study draws on a comparative framework to evaluate the translation of political implications in three Persian translations of the novellaAnimal Farm (by George Orwell), using  Fairclough’scritical discourse analysis (CDA) model. The study regards political implications and ideologies as a mode of background knowledge shared by writers and audiences in the source language. Fairclough’s mode...

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...

We use the NLP toolchain that is used to construct the Groningen Meaning Bank to address the task of detecting negation cue and scope, as defined in the shared task “Resolving the Scope and Focus of Negation”. This toolchain applies the C&C tools for parsing, using the formalism of Combinatory Categorial Grammar, and applies Boxer to produce semantic representations in the form of Discourse Rep...

We empirically show that there are significant differences between the discourse structure of Japanese texts and the discourse structure of their corresponding English translations. To improve translation quality, we propose a computational model for rewriting discourse structures. When we train our model on a parallel corpus of manually built Japanese and English discourse structure trees, we ...