The Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) was released to the public in 2008. It remains the largest manually annotated corpus of discourse relations to date. Its focus on discourse relations that are either lexically grounded in explicit discourse connectives or associated with sentential adjacency has not only facilitated its use in language technology and psycholinguistics but also has spawned the ...

Our research project investigates the effects of discourse features (particularly discourse connectives) on reading for adult beginner readers. The documents used in our experiments will be generated using a natural language generation (NLG) system. We plan a series of experiments with adult beginner readers of known reading level. The experiments will investigate the difficulty (or ease) such ...

feminist critical discourse analysis is an approach distinguished by its focus on revealing unequal power relations between women and men in their social life. in the present paper, it is suggested that simone de beauvoir’s theory of the formation of gender identity and female subject in the second sex provides a meaningful theoretical ground to the feminist critical discourse analysis. althoug...

I conducted three experiments in which I investigated how people use the definite article with entities that have never been explicitly introduced. I claim that using the definite article to determine a particular entity presupposes that that entity has a preestablished discourse referent. If an explicit discourse referent has not been supplied by previous context, additional presuppositions mu...

one of the challenges of academic writing is the creation of a structurally and communicatively well-organized and coherent text. metadiscourse enables authors of journal articles to achieve this goal by raising the writers‘ awareness about discourse features which can contribute to a better academic content production. also, l1 background has always been a hot topic in applied linguistics and ...

The corpora available for training discourse relation classifiers are annotated using a general set of discourse relations. However, for certain applications, custom discourse relations are required. Creating a new annotated corpus with a new relation taxonomy is a timeconsuming and costly process. We address this problem by proposing a semi-supervised approach to discourse relation classificat...

In this paper, it is argued that Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) should be extended to also include what may be called Critical Context Studies (CCS). After a summary of the new theory of context, defined in terms of special mental models in episodic memory, subjectively representing the ‘definition of the communicative situation’ by the participants, it is argued how a critical analysis of te...