A review of previous research on receptive skills among EFL learners  reveals that in contrast  to extensive research in reading, fewer studies have focused on the process  of listening comprehension in EFL contexts. The current study examines the effects of discourse signaling cues on Iranian EFL students' listening comprehension in academic lectures and also investigates the effect of tea...

We propose a statistical dialogue analysis model to determine discourse structures as well as speech acts using maximum entropy model. The model can automatically acquire probabilistic discourse knowledge from a discourse tagged corpus to resolve ambiguities. We propose the idea of tagging discourse segment boundaries to represent the structural information of discourse. Using this representati...

This paper is about the flow of inference between communicative intentions, discourse structure and the domain during discourse processing. We augment a theory of discourse interpretation with a theory of distinct mental attitudes and reasoning about them, in order to provide an account of how the attitudes interact with reasoning about discourse structure. INTRODUCTION The flow of inference be...

Despite showing an overtly simple structure, the semantic process in classic literary-narrative discourse conforms to complicated semiotic systems. As a result, semio-semantics is deemed as one of the most scientific, reliable tools since it helps intradiscursive semio-textual propositions be phenomenologically, and even epistemologically, analyzed. Consequently, the narrative discourse in “The...

We describe our initial efforts towards developing a large-scale corpus of Hindi texts annotated with discourse relations. Adopting the lexically grounded approach of the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), we present a preliminary analysis of discourse connectives in a small corpus. We describe how discourse connectives are represented in the sentence-level dependency annotation in Hindi, and disc...

Discourse relations between text segments can be explicitly marked using discourse connectors (e.g., because), but by far not all discourse relations are marked explicitly. However, people are usually able to infer the intended relation. What kinds of cues do people rely on? Could they in principle use structural cues from the preceding discourse to anticipate upcoming discourse relations? This...

Research in discourse processing has identi ed two representational requirements for discourse planning systems. First, discourse plans must adequately represent the intentional structure of the utterances they produce in order to enable a computational discourse agent to respond e ectively to communicative failures [15]. Second, discourse plans must represent the informational structure of utt...

This paper describes the extension of the Ontologies of Linguistic Annotation (OLiA) with respect to discourse features. The OLiA ontologies provide a a terminology repository that can be employed to facilitate the conceptual (semantic) interoperability of annotations of discourse phenomena as found in the most important corpora available to the community, including OntoNotes, the RST Discourse...

In this paper we present an overview of recent developments in discourse theory and parsing under the Linguistic Discourse Model (LDM) framework, a semantic theory of discourse structure. We give a novel approach to the problem of discourse segmentation based on discourse semantics and sketch a limited but robust approach to symbolic discourse parsing based on syntactic, semantic and lexical ru...

In this paper, we introduce LiveTree, a core component of LIDAS, the Linguistic Discourse Analysis System for automatic discourse parsing with the Unified Linguistic Discourse Model (U-LDM) (X et al, 2004). LiveTree is an integrated workbench for supervised and unsupervised creation, storage and manipulation of the discourse structure of text documents under the U-LDM. The LiveTree environment ...