adopting a discourse-pragmatic approach, this study examines the synchronic multifunctionality of the discourse marker hâlâ from the perspective of (inter)subjectification. the findings obtained from the synchronic corpus of colloquial persian indicates that hâlâ has proceeded along the (inter)subjectification cline identified by traugott and dasher (2002), der (2010), and degand and vandenberg...

Previous researches on Text-level discourse parsing mainly made use of constituency structure to parse the whole document into one discourse tree. In this paper, we present the limitations of constituency based discourse parsing and first propose to use dependency structure to directly represent the relations between elementary discourse units (EDUs). The state-of-the-art dependency parsing tec...

Discourse relation parsing is an important task with the goal of understanding text beyond the sentence boundaries. With the availability of annotated corpora (Penn Discourse Treebank) statistical discourse parsers were developed. In the literature it was shown that the discourse parsing subtasks of discourse connective detection and relation sense classification do not generalize well across d...

This study concerned the role of gestures that accompany discourse in deep learning processes. We assumed that co-speech gestures favor the construction of a complete mental representation of the discourse content, and we tested the predictions that a discourse accompanied by gestures, as compared with a discourse not accompanied by gestures, should result in better recollection of conceptual i...

Discourse connectives play an important role in making a text coherent and helping humans to infer relations between spans of text. Using the Penn Discourse Treebank, we investigate what information relevant to inferring discourse relations is conveyed by discourse connectives, and whether the specificity of discourse relations reflects general cognitive biases for establishing coherence. We al...

This paper takes a critical look at the news reports of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Saudi Arabia on Mina stampede. Previous studies have indicated that media discourse contributes to public opinion and ideology. Little, however, has been mentioned on how variation in media discourse affects the process. This study analyzed 24 news reports from the two countries from 24 to 31 September 2015...

The main aim of this report is to provide a measure of objective evaluation of ATT-Meta, a system we have implemented for conducting some of the reasoning needed in the understanding of metaphorical utterances. The report thereby also provides some evaluation of the overall theoretical approach informing ATT-Meta. The approach and system are not described in detail here, but rather in an accomp...

    A review of previous research on receptive skills among EFL learners  reveals that in contrast  to extensive research in reading, fewer studies have focused on the process  of listening comprehension in EFL contexts. The current study examines the effects of discourse signaling cues on Iranian EFL students' listening comprehension in academic lectures and also investigates the effect of tea...

We propose a statistical dialogue analysis model to determine discourse structures as well as speech acts using maximum entropy model. The model can automatically acquire probabilistic discourse knowledge from a discourse tagged corpus to resolve ambiguities. We propose the idea of tagging discourse segment boundaries to represent the structural information of discourse. Using this representati...