We present the results of several machine learning tasks designed to predict rhetorical relations that hold between clauses in discourse. We demonstrate that organizing rhetorical relations into different granularity categories (based on relative degree of detail) increases average prediction accuracy from 58% to 70%. Accuracy further increases to 80% with the inclusion of clause types. These r...

The philosophical programme associated with the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas has been widely discussed in the literature. The fact that Habermas has devoted a considerable part of his work to the elaboration of this philosophical programme indicates that discourse ethics can be regarded as a cornerstone of his communication-theoretic approach to society. In essence, Habermas conceives of...

In the present paper, we analyse variation of discourse phenomena in two typologically different languages, i.e. in German and Czech. The novelty of our approach lies in the nature of the resources we are using. Advantage is taken of existing resources, which are, however, annotated on the basis of two different frameworks. We use an interoperable scheme unifying discourse phenomena in both fra...

Relations that hold between discourse segments can, but need not, be made explicit by means of discourse connectives. Even though the explicit signaling of discourse relations is optional, not all relations can be easily conveyed implicitly. It has been proposed that readers and listeners have certain expectations about discourse and that discourse relations that are in line with these expectat...

Cochlear implants (CIs) provide speech perception to adults with severe-to-profound hearing loss, but the acoustic signal remains severely degraded. Limited access to pitch cues is thought to decrease sensitivity to prosody in CI users, but co-occurring changes in intensity and duration may provide redundant cues. The current study investigates how listeners use these cues to infer discourse pr...

Analyzing large-bodies of audiovisual information with respect to discoursepragmatic categories is a time-consuming, manual activity, yet of growing importance in a wide variety of domains. Given the transcription of the audiovisual recordings, we propose to model the task of assigning discoursepragmatic categories as supervised machine learning task. By analyzing the effects of a wide variety ...

Organism and environment are in a state of constant interaction, and discourse is viewed as one form of manifestation of this interaction. Through the study of discourse insights can be gained into those components that bring about mental events. Verbal structure, communication of beliefs and action/interaction are highly interactive dimensions of discourse. Taking this perspective as a framewo...

1. Introduction Resolving zero pronouns is a major problem in developing a natural language understanding (NLU) system for Thai. Since subject and object pronouns in Thai can be omitted from a sentence, an NLU system must be capable of identifying the missing subjects or objects in the sentence. This process of identifying referents for zero pronouns, which is a part of referent resolution 1 pr...

This paper attempts to present innovations brought into corpus methodology by using the concept of paraphrase to account for the meaning of lexical items. Collaborative knowledge building is conceived of not merely the individual introduction of paraphrases discussing the features of the discourse objects but continuous subsequent negotiation of this input over a temporal arrow. With proposal o...