This paper addresses discourse structure from the perspective of understanding. It would perhaps help us understand the na,ture of discourse relatiolls il" we better understood what units of a text. can be related to one a.nother. In Olle ma.jor theory of discourse structure, Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann &: Thompson 1988; Imrea.l'ter simply RS'T), the smallest possible linguistic units tha...

In this paper, we propose a Connectivedriven Dependency Tree (CDT) scheme to represent the discourse rhetorical structure in Chinese language, with elementary discourse units as leaf nodes and connectives as non-leaf nodes, largely motivated by the Penn Discourse Treebank and the Rhetorical Structure Theory. In particular, connectives are employed to directly represent the hierarchy of the tree...

Questions play a prominent role in social interactions, performing rhetorical functions that go beyond that of simple informational exchange. The surface form of a question can signal the intention and background of the person asking it, as well as the nature of their relation with the interlocutor. While the informational nature of questions has been extensively examined in the context of ques...

Early formulations of discourse coherence constraints postulated a connection between coreference likelihood and distance within a discourse parse, e.g. in the framework of Veins Theory (Cristea et al. 1998%CristeaIdeRomary1998), which proposes that coreference is expected to be encapsulated within tightly linked areas of discourse parses, called Domains of Referential Accessibility (DRAs). Usi...

Document-level sentiment analysis is among the most popular research fields of nature language processing in recent years, in which one of major challenges is that discourse structural information can be hardly captured by existing approaches. In this paper, a domain-independent framework for documentlevel sentiment classification with weighting rules based on Rhetorical Structure Theory is pro...

In this paper, we analyze citation contexts and characterize the different sections of scientific articles in terms of the verbs that appear in citation contexts. We have performed Factorial Correspondence Analysis (CA) using the four sections of the IMRaD (Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion) structure as categories. Our dataset contains about 80,000 research articles published in th...

This paper investigates the usefulness of prosodic features in classifying rhetorical relations between utterances in meeting recordings. Five rhetorical relations of contrast, elaboration, summary, question and cause are explored. Three training methods supervised, unsupervised, and combined are compared, and classification is carried out using support vector machines. The results of this pilo...

The organization of discourse is multifaceted. Theories that take a single perspective on discourse structure, examining for example only goal satisfaction or textual coherence or ignoring the context in which a text was generated, will fail to identify the full functional significance of the content and organization of text. The task of generating coherent text to meet some communicative inten...

This paper investigates the usefulness of prosodic features in classifying rhetorical relations between utterances in meeting recordings. Five rhetorical relations of contrast, elaboration, summary, question and cause are explored. Three training methods supervised, unsupervised, and combined are compared, and classification is carried out using support vector machines. The results of this pilo...

This paper addresses discourse structure from the perspective of understanding. It would perhaps help us understand the nature of discourse relations if we better understood what units of a text can be related to one another. In one major theory of discourse structure, Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann & Thompson 1988; hereafter simply RST), the smallest possible linguistic units that can parti...