The goal of this chapter is demonstrate one particular use of abduction in the processing of natural language discourse. DICE (Discourse In Commonsense Entailment) can be used to model both interpretation and generation. For interpretation, it uses defeasible deduction to determine the discourse structures and event structures underlying multisentential texts. For generation, it uses abduction ...

Discourse incoherence is an important and typical problem with multi-document extractive summaries. To address this issue, we have developed a schema-based summarization approach for query-based blog summaries that utilizes discourse structures. In our schema design, we tried to model discourse structures which are typically used by humans in their summary writing in response to a particular qu...

We here explore a “fully” lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar for discourse that takes the basic elements of a (monologic) discourse to be not simply clauses, but larger structures that are anchored on variously realized discourse cues. This link with intra-sentential grammar suggests an account for different patterns of discourse cues, while the different structures and operations suggest three...

Previous work by Lin et al. (2011) demonstrated the effectiveness of using discourse relations for evaluating text coherence. However, their work was based on discourse relations annotated in accordance with the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) (Prasad et al., 2008), which encodes only very shallow discourse structures; therefore, they cannot capture long-distance discourse dependencies. In this ...

We address the problem of building a flexible discourse model that enables creation of relatively complex discourse structures by using a semantic framework and semantic descriptions of media items. With such model we intend to support different approaches to hypermedia presentation authoring. We give a short overview of existing hypermedia presentation generation systems and discuss what type ...

the efficacy of genre-based approach to teaching writing has been regarded as an influential practice in l2 writing pedagogy (hyland, 2007). however, there is still gap between actual structures found in reading materials recommended as textbooks and discourse patterns recommended for l2 writing in efl contexts, the gap which would highlight the problems of genre and rhetorical patterns for tea...

The term discourse structure is used to denote any structure of a text above that of the sentence. Trees have often been posited as a good abstraction when discourse is taken to have a hierarchical structure (Mann and Thompson 1987; Webber et al. 2003; Marcu 2000; Egg and Redeker 2008). Nevertheless, periodically researchers have commented on the need to depart from the strict singleparent hier...

In this paper we propose a method of reducing the search space of a discourse parsing process, while keeping unaffected its capacity to generate cohesive and coherent tree structures. The parsing method uses Veins Theory (VT), by developing incrementally a forest of parallel discourse trees, evaluating them on cohesion and coherence criteria and keeping only the most promising structures to go ...