Discourse Parsing and Sentiment Analysis are two fundamental tasks in Natural Language Processing that have been shown to be mutually beneficial. In this work, we design and compare two Neural models for jointly learning both tasks. In the proposed approach, we first create a vector representation for all the text segments in the input sentence. Next, we apply three different Recursive Neural N...

L2 research has shown that instruction in L2 pragmatics is necessary. The current study evaluated the impact of explicit instruction on EFL learner's awareness and production of three speech acts of request, apology, and complaint. It also probed whether learners’ language proficiency plays any role in incorporating pragmatic instruction into the L2 classroom. Iranian undergraduate students maj...

We contrast two views of how contextual influence on sentence meaning composition can be explained. The Semantic Similarity View maintains that discourse context affects sentence meaning mainly because of the semantic similarity between the words in the discourse context and the words in the sentence (as measured by Latent Semantic Analysis). The Free Pragmatic View, in contrast, defends the cl...

Several discourse annotated corpora now exist for NLP. But they use different, not easily comparable annotation schemes: are the structures these schemes describe incompatible, incomparable, or do they share interpretations? In this paper, we relate three types of discourse annotation used in corpora or discourse parsing: (i) RST, (ii) SDRT, and (iii) dependency tree structures. We offer a comm...

We explore the perception and production of English statements, absolute yes-no questions, declarative questions by Inuktitut-English sequential bilinguals. Inuktitut does not mark stress, intonation is used as a cue for phrasing, while statements are morphologically marked suffix added to verbal root. Conversely, both prosodically syntactically marked, whereas difference between prosodic. To d...

Research on coreference resolution and summarization has modeled the way entities are realized as concrete phrases in discourse. In particular there exist models of the noun phrase syntax used for discourse-new versus discourse-old referents, and models describing the likely distance between a pronoun and its antecedent. However, models of discourse coherence, as applied to information ordering...

Discourse prosody in school-aged children’s narratives was investigated to test for developmental changes in transitional prosody and to characterize the acquisition of key contrastive features for marking continuation versus completion. Spontaneous narratives were obtained from 42 children (5 to 7 years old) and 14 adult caregivers. The narratives were prosodically transcribed using a formal a...

Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) coordinate execution of logically related multiple tasks in an organization. A workflow schema is defined using a set of tasks that are coordinated using dependencies. Workflows instantiated from the same schema may differ with respect to the tasks executed. An important issue that must be addressed while designing a workflow is to decide what tasks are needed...

this study was an attempt to investigate iranian and spanish intermediate nonnative english learners’ request strategies to their faculty. to this aim, 74 (50 iranian and 24 spanish) nonnative english intermediate learners participated in this study. a discourse completion test (dct) was used to elicit the request strategies used by the participants. the findings suggested the participants empl...