Recent interests in the use of multimedia presentations and multimodal interfaces have raised the need for the automatic generation of graphics and especially temporal media. This paper presents an engine to build video documentaries from annotated audio commentaries. The engine, taking into consideration the discourse structure of the commentary, plans the segmentation in shots as well as the ...

This article describes the generation of aggregated and elliptic sentences, using Dependency Trees connected by rhetorical relations as input. The system we have developed can generate both hypotactic and paratactic constructions with appropriate cue words, and various forms of ellipsis such as Gapping and Conjunction Reduction. We contend that Dependency Trees connected by rhetorical relations...

We are interested in the nature of content structures in terms of which it would be possible to account for reasoning processes in understanding natural language texts. One of the most crucial problems here at the present time is: how and by which mechanisms these reasoning processes are controlled and directed. As the emphasis in the design of discourse understanding systems so far has been on...

We describe experiments that show that the concepts of rhetorical analysts and nucleanty can be used effectively for deternumng the most nnportant umts m a text We show how these concepts can be xmplemented and we discuss results that we obtained with a chscourse-based summanzatmn program

Most studies of FOSS organizational migration projects focus solely on technological and economical aspects, neglecting the importance of organizational discourse structures for migration decisions as well as success. In looking at the case of the municipality of Munich this paper uses structuration theory in combination with discourse analysis to explain why and how in this case actors were ab...

Kamp's Discourse Representation Theory is a major breakthrough regarding the systematic translation of natural language discourse into logical form. We have therefore chosen to marry the User Specialty Languages System, which was originally designed as a natural language frontend to a relational database system, with this new theory. In the paper we try to show taking for the sake of simplicity...

PENG Light is a controlled natural language designed to write unambiguous specifications that can be translated automatically via discourse representation structures into a formal target language. Instead of writing axioms in a formal language, an author writes a specification and the associated background axioms directly in controlled natural language. In this paper, we first review the contro...

Litman and Allen are concerned with the relationship between plan recognition in discourse and the underlying commonsense structures that are necessary to support the discourse. Building around a train-trip scenario, they demonstrate the importance of commonsense understanding of plans to the ability to analyze a discourse revolving around this plan. In this capacity they make the distinction b...

In this paper, we present a novel approach for identifying argumentative discourse structures in persuasive essays. The structure of argumentation consists of several components (i.e. claims and premises) that are connected with argumentative relations. We consider this task in two consecutive steps. First, we identify the components of arguments using multiclass classification. Second, we clas...

I show that the semantic structure for discourses, understood as a dependency representation, can be mathematically characterized as DAGs, but these DAGs present heavy structural constraints. The argumentation is based on a simple case, i.e. discourses with three clauses and two discourse connectives. I show that only four types of DAGs are needed for these discourses.