This article introduces a qualitative research method called discourse tracing. Discourse tracing draws from contributions made by ethnographers, discourse critics, case study scholars, and process tracers. The approach offers new insights and an attendant language about how we engage in research designed specifically for the critical-interpretive and applied analysis of discourse. More specifi...

Implicit discourse relation recognition is a crucial component for automatic discourse-level analysis and nature language understanding. Previous studies exploit discriminative models that are built on either powerful manual features or deep discourse representations. In this paper, instead, we explore generative models and propose a variational neural discourse relation recognizer. We refer to...

The symposium entitled Empirical Methods in Discourse Interpretation and Generation had two goals: (1) to investigate the empirical methods that can be used in the development and evaluation of computational theories of discourse and (2) to develop a set of shared resources for the computational discourse community. The workshop was successful at achieving the first goal because of the large nu...

Classical constraint systems require that the set of variables which exist in a problem be known ab initio. However, there are some applications in which the existence of certain variables is dependent on conditions whose truth or falsity can only be determined dynamically. In this paper, we show how this conditional existence of variables can be handled in a mathematically well-founded fashion...

Two of the main corpora available for training discourse relation classifiers are the RST Discourse Treebank (RST-DT) and the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), which are both based on the Wall Street Journal corpus. Most recent work using discourse relation classifiers have employed fully-supervised methods on these corpora. However, certain discourse relations have little labeled data, causing l...

Sequence Models and Ranking Methods for Discourse Parsing A dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts by Ben Wellner Many important aspects of natural language reside beyond the level of a single sentence or clause, at the level of the discourse, including: reference relations such anaphora, notions of topic/...

This paper presents a work-in-progress on the automatic analysis of discourse genre in non-elicited speech. The study is focused on the development of bottom-up methods for automatic validation of discourse typologies found in linguistic descriptions (prosodic, syntactic, pragmatic and/or contextual and situational cues). The linguistic classification examined here opposes five discourse genres...

Polarity classification of opinionated sentences with both positive and negative sentiments1 is a key challenge in sentiment analysis. This paper presents a novel unsupervised method for discovering intra-sentence level discourse relations for eliminating polarity ambiguities. Firstly, a discourse scheme with discourse constraints on polarity was defined empirically based on Rhetorical Structur...

The study of discourse can be undertaken from different perspectives (e.g., linguistic, cognitive, or computational) with differing purposes in mind (e.g., to study language use or to analyze social practices). The aim of Discourse on the Move is to show that it is possible and profitable to join quantitative and qualitative analyses to study discourse structures. Whereas corpus-based quantitat...