Organizations constantly produce and consume organizational language, and these texts and documents are a primary way that organizations interact with their environment. In this paper we compare different types of texts to study variation in how organizations use them to interact with the environment. We argue that the authors of a text will primarily use rhetorical strategies that reflect the ...

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/...

This chapter studies the use of textual features based on systemic functional linguistics, for genre-based text categorization. We describe feature sets that represent different types of conjunctions and modal assessment, which together can partially indicate how different genres structure text and may prefer certain classes of attitudes towards propositions in the text. This enables analysis o...

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.

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...

We use textual features motivated by systemic functional linguistic theory for genre-based text categorization. We have developed feature sets representing different types of conjunctions and modal assessment, which together indicate (partially) how different genres structure texts and express attitudes towards propositions in the text. Using such features enables analysis of large-scale rhetor...

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 ...