Computationally modeling the evolution of science by tracking how scientific topics rise and fall over time has important implications for research funding and public policy. However, little is known about the mechanisms underlying topic growth and decline. We investigate the role of rhetorical framing: whether the rhetorical role or function that authors ascribe to topics (as methods, as goals...

Computer games have not been adequately theorized within the humanities. In this paper a brief history of computer games is presented as a starting point for developing a topology of games and a theory of computer games as rhetorical artifacts suitable for critical study. The paper addresses the question of why games should be treated seriously and suggests a theoretical approach based on Backh...

Jan Renkema, in his Introduction to Discourse Studies, describes current research in coherence relations (also called rhetorical or discourse relations), and lists a few open questions in that area. One of the most important issues, from both a theoretical and applied point of view, is the signaling of relations, that is, the explicit marking of the presence of a relation. In this paper, I ques...

Abstract in every research paper has always been functioning as an attention-grabber which can encourage readers to keep reading the research or to dissuade it. Although abstracts are believed to play an important role in distributing the research findings, few studies have been done to evaluate the rhetorical organization of thesis abstracts, especially in the field of Teaching English as a Fo...

In this paper the research focus is on the task of answer extraction for why-questions. As opposed to techniques for factoid QA, finding answers to whyquestions involves exploiting text structure. Therefore, we approach the answer extraction problem as a discourse analysis task, using Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) as framework. We evaluated this method using a set of why-questions that have...

abstract thematic development refers to the way theme and rheme in the clause are developed. the theory of rhetorical structure can be defined as the strategies that follow specific ways to make writing more persuasive. the present study aimed to examine how iraqi writers maintain cohesion in the text by analyzing the patterns of thematic progression in various rhetorical sections in an online ...