This paper describes a pedagogical agent that helps children to learn to author structured presentations about explanations of concepts. Using a Rhetorical Structure Theory analysis of a source Web page, the agent performs pedagogical tasks to support the user's understanding of rhetorical relations, stimulates reflection about the relations between the structure of the original text and the st...

The Text2Dialogue (T2D) system that we are developing allows digital content creators to generate attractive multi-modal dialogues presented by two virtual agents—by simply providing textual information as input. We use Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to decompose text into segments and to identify rhetorical discourse relations between them. These are then “acted out” by two 3D agents using ...

In this paper we investigate how discourse structure a ects the meanings of words and how the meanings of words a ect discourse structure We integrate three ingredients a theory of discourse structure called sdrt which represents discourse in terms of rhetorical relations that glue together the propositions introduced by the text segments an accom panying theory of discourse attachment called d...

A viable model of interactive discourse must explain how interlocutors share conversational control to construct the discourse, and recognize the contributions of others to it. The position that I take in this paper is from a narrower perspective, one in which there is a primary speaker who controls and directs the discourse, but that does so while trying to accommodate the informational needs ...

This paper provides a corpus-based generic characterization of appointment-scheduling dialogues—a type of task-oriented conversation—by concentrating on the rhetorical and thematic choices made by the speakers that produce them. The analytical tools used for this study are Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), the notion of Theme as defined in Systemic Functional Linguistics, and Thematic Progress...

This paper describes how discursive knowledge, given by the discursive theories RST (Rhetorical Structure Theory) and CST (Crossdocument Structure Theory), may improve the automatic evaluation of local coherence in multi-document summaries. Two of the main coherence models from literature were incremented with discursive information and obtained 91.3% of accuracy, with a gain of 53% in relation...

The Text2Dialogue (T2D) system that we are developing allows digital content creators to generate attractive multi-modal dialogues presented by two virtual agents—by simply providing textual information as input. We use Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to decompose text into segments and to identify rhetorical discourse relations between them. These are then “acted out” by two 3D agents using ...

The AlethGen tool has been used to build a system for automatically generating replies to complaints, for a European mail-order company. In the current version, letters are generated in French. AlethGen consists of several modules: the text deep structure planner (or conceptual planner), the text surface structure planner (or rhetorical planner), the computation of pronouns and quantifiers, and...

In the current study we aim at exploiting discourse structure of Arabic text to automatically finding answers to non-factoid questions ("Why" and "How to"). Our method is based on Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) that many studies have shown to be a very effective approach for many computational linguistics applications such as (text generation, text summarization and machine translation). For...

This paper discusses a fundamental problem in natural language generation: how to organize the content of a text in a coherent and natural way. In this research, we set out to determine the semantic content and the rhetorical structure of texts and to develop heuristics to perform this process automatically within a text generation framework. The study was performed on a specific language and t...