Rhetorical structure theory (RST) provides a model of textual function based upon rhetoric. Initially developed as a model of text coherence, RST has been used extensively in text generation research, and has more recently been proposed as a basis for multimedia presentation generation. This paper investigates the use of RST for generating video presentations having a rhetorical form, using mod...

Sequence Models and Ranking Methods for Discourse Parsing A dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts by Ben Wellner Many important aspects of natural language reside beyond the level of a single sentence or clause, at the level of the discourse, including: reference relations such anaphora, notions of topic/...

For analyzing argumentative text, we propose to study the ‘depth’ of argumentation as one important component, which we distinguish from argument quality. In a pilot study with German newspaper commentary texts, we asked students to rate the degree of argumentativeness, and then looked for correlations with features of the annotated argumentation structure and the rhetorical structure (in terms...

We present a shift-reduce rhetorical parsing algorithm that learns to construct rhetorical structures of texts from a corpus of discourse-parse action sequences. The algorithm exploits robust lexical, syntactic, and semantic knowledge sources.

Synaesthesia takes place when ordinary stimuli elicit extraordinary conscious experiences. As a rhetorical figure, synaesthesia consists on giving a thing a quality that in fact it cannot have because the thing and the quality are perceived by different senses (e.g. “white noises”). But the physiological and the conceptual or linguistic realities are in fact part of a whole that can be approach...

Economists included knowledge their models to improve their explanatory accuracy. A major step was to describe the production of knowledge as well as its exploitation as an internal part of economic models. Politicians prefer to talk about a new kind of economy so they can sustain the myth of progress. Rather than explain economies using a new model they try to leave economic history intact whi...

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 ...

We propose an extractive summarization system with a novel non-generative probabilistic framework for speech summarization. One of the most under-utilized features in extractive summarization is rhetorical information -semantically cohesive units that are hidden in spoken documents. We propose Rhetorical-State Hidden Markov Models (RSHMMs) to automatically decode this underlying structure in sp...

Citations in scientific writing fulfil an important role in creating relationships among mutually relevant articles within a research field. These inter-article relationships reinforce the argumentation structure intrinsic to all scientific writing. Therefore, determining the nature of the exact relationship between a citing and cited paper requires an understanding of the rhetorical relations ...

We propose an extractive summarization system with a novel non-generative probabilistic framework for speech summarization. One of the most under-utilized features in extractive summarization is rhetorical information -semantically cohesive units that are hidden in spoken documents. We propose Rhetorical-State Hidden Markov Models (RSHMMs) to automatically decode this underlying structure in sp...