The automatic identification of discourse relations is still a challenging task in natural language processing. Discourse connectives, such as since or but, are the most informative cues to identify explicit relations; however discourse parsers typically use a closed inventory of such connectives. As a result, discourse relations signaled by markers outside these inventories (i.e. AltLexes) are...

The paper deals with the cohesion part of a model of global discourse interpretation, usually known as Veins Theory (VT). By taking the notion of nuclearity (though ignoring relations), from the Rhetorical Structure Theory, VT computes strings of discourse units, called veins, from which domains of accessibility can be determined for each discourse unit. VT’s constructs best fit with an increme...

A consistent text contains rich resources of in formation such as collocation patterns that can be used to resolve ambiguities within its sentences For example attachment ambigui ties in a sentence can be resolved by selecting a candidate attachment that matches attach ments found in other sentences in the same dis course Thus, discourse can be regarded as a valuable knowledge resource for sent...

Texts are commonly interpreted based on the entire discourse in which they are situated. Discourse processing has been shown useful for inference-based application; yet, most systems for textual entailment – a generic paradigm for applied inference – have only addressed discourse considerations via off-the-shelf coreference resolvers. In this paper we explore various discourse aspects in entail...

as a member of larger familyof formulaic sequences , lexical bundles play different discourse functions in written research articles. this study investigated the use of four-word lexical bundles in published research articles in medicine via natural language processing by computational linguistics. a corpus of 2,420,914 words was extracted from 790 research articles in 33 medical disciplines. f...

L1 English and L1 Taiwan Mandarin discourselength English speech data extracted from the TWNAESOP corpus was analyzed using a perceptually-based hierarchy of prosodic phrase group (HPG) framework in order to investigate similarities and differences in the organization of discourse-level speech planning in English across L1 (native) and L2 (non-native) speaker groups. While both groups appear to...

Repetition and semantic-associative priming effects have been demonstrated for words in nonstructured contexts (i.e., word pairs or lists of words) in numerous behavioral and electrophysiological studies. The processing of a word has thus been shown to benefit from the prior presentation of an identical or associated word in the absence of a constraining context. An examination of such priming ...

In this paper, we offer a novel method for processing given information in discourse, paying particular attention to definite descriptions. We argue that extant theories don’t do justice to the complexity of interaction between the knowledge resources that are used. In line with Hobbs (1979), we claim that discourse structure—as defined by the rhetorical connections between the propositions int...