This paper focuses on the encoding of contrast in European Portuguese (EP), specifically by analysing contrastive parallelism structures, which seem to be crucial in the construction of the type of discourse that will be analysed: the argumentative discourse. Hence, my main goal is discussing how contrast is prosodically encoded in these structures and to relate the results with previous ones f...

media can be a good representation of dominant ideologies in society. the analysis of such discourse can shed light on the mental and social structures of people in society. adopting van dijk’s (1995) layout of discourse ideology and his (2000) practical and general outline of ideological analysis, this study analyzes the iranian movie a separation, the winner of the 84th annual academy award f...

In this paper, we present a discriminative approach for reranking discourse trees generated by an existing probabilistic discourse parser. The reranker relies on tree kernels (TKs) to capture the global dependencies between discourse units in a tree. In particular, we design new computational structures of discourse trees, which combined with standard TKs, originate novel discourse TKs. The emp...

In this paper, we propose a generalization of Centering Theory (CT) (Grosz, Joshi, Weinstein (1995)) called Veins Theory (VT), which extends the applicability of centering rules from local to global discourse. A key facet of the theory involves the identification of <> over discourse structure trees such as those defined in RST, which delimit domains of referential accessibility for each...

Before a president practically begins his four-year term of office in Iran, a formal inaugural ceremony is held in the parliament. Being attended by national dignitaries and representatives from other countries, the inauguration of Iran's seventh president, Hasan Rouhani, was spectacular in several respects. The current study aimed at investigating the generic structure and rhetorical moves tha...

This paper contributes to the question of which degree of complexity is called for in representations of discourse structure. We review recent claims that tree structures do not suffice as a model for discourse structure, with a focus on the work done on the Discourse Graphbank (DGB) of Wolf and Gibson (2005, 2006). We will show that much of the additional complexity in the DGB is not inherent ...

Discourse segmentation is the division of a text into minimal discourse segments, which form the leaves in the trees that are used to represent discourse structures. A definition of elementary discourse segments in German is provided by adapting widely used segmentation principles for English minimal units, while considering punctuation, morphology, sytax, and aspects of the logical document st...

A correct structural analysis of a discourse is a prerequisite for understanding it. This paper sketches the outline of a discourse grammar which acknowledges several different levels of structure. This gram~nar, the "Dynamic Discourse Model", uses an Augmented Transition Network parsing mechanism to build a representation of the semantics of a discourse in a stepwise fashion, from left to righ...