Countability of English nouns is important in various natural language processing tasks. It especially plays an important role in machine translation since it determines the range of possible determiners. This paper proposes a method for reinforcing countability prediction by introducing a novel concept called one countability per discourse. It claims that when a noun appears more than once in ...

In this paper, we describe novel methods for topic segmentation based on patterns of discourse organization. Using a corpus of news texts, our results show that it is possible to use discourse features (based on Rhetorical Structure Theory) for topic segmentation and that we outperform some well-known methods.

Discourse markers foreshadow the message thrust of texts and saliently guide their rhetorical structure which are important for content filtering and text abstraction. This paper reports on efforts to automatically identify and classify discourse markers in Chinese texts using heuristic-based and corpus-based data-mining methods, as an integral part of automatic text summarization via rhetorica...

Studies of discourse relations have not, in the past, attempted to characterize what serves as evidence for them, beyond lists of frozen expressions, or markers, drawn from a few well-defined syntactic classes. In this paper, we describe how the lexicalized discourse relation annotations of the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) led to the discovery of a wide range of additional expressions, annota...

Discourse structure is the hidden link between surface features and document-level properties, such as sentiment polarity. We show that the discourse analyses produced by Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) parsers can improve document-level sentiment analysis, via composition of local information up the discourse tree. First, we show that reweighting discourse units according to their position i...

Recent works in the NLP community show an increasing interest for the analysis of discourse structure, leading to a variety of models and applications. We claim that a constraint-based approach allows a high level, abstract, description of various discourse structures, together with the design of an operative framework for generic analysis methods. The CDML formalism (Constraint-based Discourse...

In this study a method for discourse segmentation is introduced and applied to the Turkish language domain. A high agreement among the subjects are observed by means of statistical methods. Another observation was that the outcome of the discourse segmentation has been in parallel with the predictions of both the Centering Theory and Discourse Marker. Decision trees for various combinations of ...

The observation that discourse is more than a mere sequence of utterances or sentences amounts to a truism. But what follows from this? In what way does the ”value added” arise when segments of discourse are juxtaposed how does hierarchical structure originate from a linearized discourse? While many discourse phenomena apply to dialogue and monologue alike, this tutorial will center its attenti...

Recent studies on extractive text summarization formulate it as a combinatorial optimization problem such as a Knapsack Problem, a Maximum Coverage Problem or a Budgeted Median Problem. These methods successfully improved summarization quality, but they did not consider the rhetorical relations between the textual units of a source document. Thus, summaries generated by these methods may lack l...