Discourse relations between two text segments play an important role in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The connectives strongly indicate the sense of discourse relations, while in fact, there are no connectives in a large proportion of discourse relations, i.e., implicit discourse relations. The key for implicit relation prediction is to correctly model the semantics of the two d...

Discourse markers are universal linguistic events subject to language variation. Although an extensive literature has already reported language specific traits of these events (e.g. [6,7,4,3,9]), little has been said on their cross-language behavior and, subsequently, on building an inventory of multilingual lexica of discourse markers. Thus, this work describes new methods and approaches for t...

Prominence variation is known to be determined in part by discourse factors, such as the givenness or newness of the discourse entity being realized to the discourse. However, few empirical studies have been carried out to explain a wider range of phenomena occurring in natural speech corpora. In this study, corpus linguistics methods are applied to a task-oriented monologue corpus to show that...

This study aimed to examine the effect of flexible group collaboration on students’ constructive discourse in a principle-based CSCL environment. The participants included 27 Chinese undergraduate students taking a 16-week introductory research methods course. The online discourse adopted a flexible collaboration structure: fixed small group collaboration in the first eight weeks, and opportuni...

Implicit discourse relation recognition is a challenging task in the natural language processing field, but important to many applications such as question answering, summarizat ion and so on. Previous research used either art ificially created implicit discourse relat ions with connectives removed from explicit relations or annotated implicit relat ions as training data to detect the possible ...

This study explored the professional development experiences of 28 practicing teachers in 10 Chicago suburban schools involved in a two-year technology supported Problem-Based Learning curriculum development effort. Asynchronous computer-mediated communications (CMC) were featured as teacher communication tools of the project. The computer-mediated discourse produced by the teachers was compare...