Spoken Discourse

The article deals with discourse markers for showing a change in the way the conversation is developing or showing the other speaker how you are reacting to what they are saying

Discourse analysis

Discourse analysis is an umbrella term for a range of methodological approaches that analyse the use and functions of talk and text within social interaction. These approaches are used across social science disciplines such as psychology, sociology, linguistics, anthropology and communication studies. Discourse analysis is interdisciplinary in nature, developed from work within speech act theory, ethnomethodology and semiology as well as post-structuralist theorists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and the later works of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Discourse analysis approaches are crucial for understanding human relationships because they focus primarily on interaction: how we talk to each other and the discursive practices (talking, writing) through which relationships develop, fall apart and so on. This entry covers central features of discourse analysis, methodological issues and some of the most commonly used versions of discourse analysis

Discourse Analysis

This chapter (a) presents discourse analysis as both epistemology and methodology; (b) suggests a sociolinguistic toolkit that could be used as one type of approach to conducting discourse analysis; (c) reviews and points to literature in music education and music therapy that have used such epistemological and methodological tools; and (d) suggests that, by engaging with discourse analysis, we can begin to ask questions about participants and their interactions within environments where music therapists operate and analyze prevailing discourses within structures and systems of music therapy. [excerpt

Joint Syntacto-Discourse Parsing and the Syntacto-Discourse Treebank

Discourse parsing has long been treated as a stand-alone problem independent from constituency or dependency parsing. Most attempts at this problem are pipelined rather than end-to-end, sophisticated, and not self-contained: they assume gold-standard text segmentations (Elementary Discourse Units), and use external parsers for syntactic features. In this paper we propose the first end-to-end discourse parser that jointly parses in both syntax and discourse levels, as well as the first syntacto-discourse treebank by integrating the Penn Treebank with the RST Treebank. Built upon our recent span-based constituency parser, this joint syntacto-discourse parser requires no preprocessing whatsoever (such as segmentation or feature extraction), achieves the state-of-the-art end-to-end discourse parsing accuracy.Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 201

Implicit Discourse Relation Classification via Multi-Task Neural Networks

Without discourse connectives, classifying implicit discourse relations is a challenging task and a bottleneck for building a practical discourse parser. Previous research usually makes use of one kind of discourse framework such as PDTB or RST to improve the classification performance on discourse relations. Actually, under different discourse annotation frameworks, there exist multiple corpora which have internal connections. To exploit the combination of different discourse corpora, we design related discourse classification tasks specific to a corpus, and propose a novel Convolutional Neural Network embedded multi-task learning system to synthesize these tasks by learning both unique and shared representations for each task. The experimental results on the PDTB implicit discourse relation classification task demonstrate that our model achieves significant gains over baseline systems.Comment: This is the pre-print version of a paper accepted by AAAI-1

Dialogue and Discourse

This paper sets out to apply a survey of the literature on discourse and dialogue in relation to teaching and learning to the context of a pre-sessional academic English programme for international students destined for under- or postgraduate courses across a range of disciplines in a post-1992 university. ‘International’ students, here, are those whose first language is not English and who have undertaken most, if not all, of their previous education outside the UK in their first language. Most participants are required to complete the 12-week full-time course as a precondition for university entry, based on current English language competency at a level 0.5/1 IELTS point below institutional entry requirements. Our multi-disciplinary programme aims to progress students’ English language proficiency, to acculturate them to U.K. Higher Education and to determine their readiness to proceed, in terms of language level, to their subsequent course. This paper sets the programme in the wider HE context with reference to the literature on discourse theory and, briefly, to issues of blended learning

Anaphora and Discourse Structure

We argue in this paper that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within discourse structure, instead work anaphorically to contribute relational meaning, with only indirect dependence on discourse structure. This allows a simpler discourse structure to provide scaffolding for compositional semantics, and reveals multiple ways in which the relational meaning conveyed by adverbial connectives can interact with that associated with discourse structure. We conclude by sketching out a lexicalised grammar for discourse that facilitates discourse interpretation as a product of compositional rules, anaphor resolution and inference.Comment: 45 pages, 17 figures. Revised resubmission to Computational Linguistic