In this paper, we address the problem of planning the textual organization of instructions. We take the view that natural language generation (NLG) is a mapping process of diierent levels of conceptual and textual representations. Within this framework , we consider the mapping between the text's semantic representation and its rhetorical structure. We argue that such a mapping is not direct, b...

In many applications in computational linguistics, such as machine translation, we want to understand why a writer has used language in a particular way, what specific effects she intended to convey, and which linguistic choices were made to achieve those goals. This idea, that a writer has specific communicative goals or intentions in mind when she composes text, goes back to the study of clas...

Rhetorical Structure Theory is a theory of text organization that has led to areas of application beyond discourse analysis and text generation, its original goals. In this paper, we review the most important applications in several areas: discourse analysis, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. We also provide a list of resources useful for work within the...

The ADROIT system that we are developing allows automatic discourse analysis of information rich natural language texts extracted directly from the web. We use guidelines and relations of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to decompose texts into elementary segments and to perform the discourse parsing between them. In this paper, we present version 1.0 of ADROIT and focus on the noble technique...

While a coherent organization is necessary for the generation of a multisentential paragraph, this organization itself conveys information, such as what knowledge is primary and what is secondary, and which of the various possible relationships between the pieces of knowledge the speaker wishes to make explicit. The organization of the message is an integral part of the message. Given this, it ...

Student veteran’s (SV) transition into academic life is challenging, and faculty/staff are uniquely positioned to support this change. Research calls for training SVs’ aid in their retention success. Framed by Rhetorical Relational Goal Theory (RRGT; Mottet et al., 2006), qualitative data identified instructional communication needs produced a program. Twenty-three SVs were interviewed about ne...

In this paper, I present a model of the local organization of extended text. I show that texts with weak rhetorical structure and strong domain structure, such as descriptions of houses, digital circuits, and families, are best analyzed in terms of local domain structure, and argue that global structures that may be inferred from a domain are not always appropriate for constructing descriptions...

The goal of this research was to find a way to extend the capabilities of computers through the processing of language in a more human way, and present applications which demonstrate the power of this method. This research presents a novel approach, Rhetorical Analysis, to solving problems in Natural Language Processing (NLP). The main benefit of Rhetorical Analysis, as opposed to previous appr...