The work reported in this paper is part of a project that aims at describing the role of prosody in conveying discourse structure in European Portuguese. We conducted an empirical study to investigate whether the organization of discourse could be reflected by the occurrence of pauses. In order to achieve that, we started by asking sixteen subjects to annotate two texts using two discourse segm...

It is generally accepted that a discourse connective expresses a semantic and/or pragmatic relation between its matrix sentence or clause and something in the previous discourse. Usually the sense of this relation is expressed as a label, often within a hierarchy of sense labels. But the meaning of these labels may vary from system to system, and the same connective may be assigned different la...

We present the first effort towards producing an Arabic Discourse Treebank, a news corpus where all discourse connectives are identified and annotated with the discourse relations they convey as well as with the two arguments they relate. We discuss our collection of Arabic discourse connectives as well as principles for identifying and annotating them in context, taking into account properties...

automated feedback that helps them revise their work and ultimately improve their writing skills. These applications also address educational researchers’ interest in individualized instruction. Specifically, feedback that refers explicitly to students’own writing is more effective than general feedback.3 Our discourse analysis software, which is embedded in Criterion (www.etstechnologies.com),...

Discourse analysis has come to represent something of a ‘growth industry’ in both research and critical psychology. Despite the apparent indebtedness of many such methods of discourse analysis to Foucault, there exists no strictly Foucauldian method of analysing discourse. Through a close reading of Foucault's ‘The order of discourse’ (1981), this paper re-characterizes the concept of discourse...

This paper is concerned with the robust analysis of the discourse structure of a text via underspecification. Most current discourse theories (e.g. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) by Mann and Thompson (1988), Abduction by Hobbs et al. (1993) or Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) by Asher (1993)) require detailed world and context knowledge for the derivation of the discourse str...

PURPOSE To understand risk-related practices of older adults returning home posthospitalization. RESEARCH DESIGN Qualitative methods informed by critical discourse theory, designed to uncover linkages between broader social practices and peoples' talk and stories, were used. METHODS Eight older adults, screened as high-risk from an inpatient cardiology unit, and six partners were interviewe...