37,575 research outputs found
Can text structure be incompatible with rhetorical structure?
Scott and Souza (1990) have posed the problem of how a rhetorical structure (in which propositions are linked by rhetorical relations, but not yet arranged in a linear order) can be realized by a text structure (in which propositions are ordered and linked up by appropriate discourse connectives) Almost all work on this problem assumes)implicitly or explicitly, that this mapping is governed by a constraint on compatibility of structure. We show how this constraint can be stated precisely, and present some counterexamples which seem acceptable even though they violate compatibility. The examples are based on a phenomenon we call extraposition, in which complex embedded constituents of a rhetorical structure are extracted and realized separately
Intonation and discourse : biased questions
This paper surveys a range of constructions in which prosody affects discourse function and discourse structure.We discuss English tag questions, negative polar questions, and what we call āfocusā questions. We postulate that these question types are complex speech acts and outline an analysis in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) to account for the interactions between prosody and discourse
Constructing the other: managerial rhetorics of diversity.
In this article, we examine how HR managers rhetorically construct diversity as discourses of Otherness. Our analysis relies on argument schemes developed by the classical rhetoric tradition. HR managers talk about diverse employees as visible, hearable and enjoyable Others, measure Otherness in terms of time, pace and rhythm, and evaluate the Other in terms of his/her compliance. While these discourses are varied and sometimes contradict the dominant (negative) Discourses of Otherness, they remain at the same time monolithic. The construction and valorisation of Otherness is predominantly deployed in function of reinforcing dominant managerial Discourses of discipline, compliance and control.Employment; Expected; Managers; Studies;
The study of metaphor as part of Critical Discourse Analysis
This article discusses how the study of metaphoric and more generally, figurative language use contributes to critical discourse analysis (CDA). It shows how cognitive linguistsā recognition of metaphor as a fundamental means of concept- and argument-building can add to CDA's account of meaning constitution in the social context. It then discusses discrepancies between the early model of conceptual metaphor theory and empirical data and argues that discursive-pragmatic factors as well as sociolinguistic variation have to be taken into account in order to make cognitive analyses more empirically and socially relevant. In conclusion, we sketch a modified cognitive approach informed by Relevance Theory within CDA
Generating multimedia presentations: from plain text to screenplay
In many Natural Language Generation (NLG) applications, the output is limited to plain text ā i.e., a string of words with punctuation and paragraph breaks, but no indications for layout, or pictures, or dialogue. In several projects, we have begun to explore NLG applications in which these extra media are brought into play. This paper gives an informal account of what we have learned. For coherence, we focus on the domain of patient information leaflets, and follow an example in which the same content is expressed first in plain text, then in formatted text, then in text with pictures, and finally in a dialogue script that can be performed by two animated agents. We show how the same meaning can be mapped to realisation patterns in different media, and how the expanded options for expressing meaning are related to the perceived style and tone of the presentation. Throughout, we stress that the extra media are not simple added to plain text, but integrated with it: thus the use of formatting, or pictures, or dialogue, may require radical rewording of the text itself
Jointly Modeling Topics and Intents with Global Order Structure
Modeling document structure is of great importance for discourse analysis and
related applications. The goal of this research is to capture the document
intent structure by modeling documents as a mixture of topic words and
rhetorical words. While the topics are relatively unchanged through one
document, the rhetorical functions of sentences usually change following
certain orders in discourse. We propose GMM-LDA, a topic modeling based
Bayesian unsupervised model, to analyze the document intent structure
cooperated with order information. Our model is flexible that has the ability
to combine the annotations and do supervised learning. Additionally, entropic
regularization can be introduced to model the significant divergence between
topics and intents. We perform experiments in both unsupervised and supervised
settings, results show the superiority of our model over several
state-of-the-art baselines.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 201
Intentions and Information in Discourse
This paper is about the flow of inference between communicative intentions,
discourse structure and the domain during discourse processing. We augment a
theory of discourse interpretation with a theory of distinct mental attitudes
and reasoning about them, in order to provide an account of how the attitudes
interact with reasoning about discourse structure
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