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

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

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

Political Discourse Approach Applied the Current Study Issue Occurred

The research was to aim at approaching a political discourse as an effort to solve the issues. News reporting assigns meaning to issues by providing a continuous record of public events and visibility to the claims of actors. The public sphere is an important field where social problems are constructed and political alternatives become defined. When one considers these functions, it is hardly surprising that news has become an important source of data for a group of researchers who are interested in studying the nature of political challenges that are mobilized in the public domain. However, there sometimes appears to be a tendency within the social movements field to let theoretical development outrun a discussion on the methods with which we are equipped to address our research questions. In this contribution, our focus will be self-consciously directed to methods, and more precisely we make specific proposals regarding how the important methodological developments that have been made in the field in recent times, might be profitably extended.&nbsp

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

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 “focus” 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

Learning Recursive Segments for Discourse Parsing

Automatically detecting discourse segments is an important preliminary step towards full discourse parsing. Previous research on discourse segmentation have relied on the assumption that elementary discourse units (EDUs) in a document always form a linear sequence (i.e., they can never be nested). Unfortunately, this assumption turns out to be too strong, for some theories of discourse like SDRT allows for nested discourse units. In this paper, we present a simple approach to discourse segmentation that is able to produce nested EDUs. Our approach builds on standard multi-class classification techniques combined with a simple repairing heuristic that enforces global coherence. Our system was developed and evaluated on the first round of annotations provided by the French Annodis project (an ongoing effort to create a discourse bank for French). Cross-validated on only 47 documents (1,445 EDUs), our system achieves encouraging performance results with an F-score of 73% for finding EDUs.Comment: published at LREC 201

Modelling Discourse-related terminology in OntoLingAnnot’s ontologies

Recently, computational linguists have shown great interest in discourse annotation in an attempt to capture the internal relations in texts. With this aim, we have formalized the linguistic knowledge associated to discourse into different linguistic ontologies. In this paper, we present the most prominent discourse-related terms and concepts included in the ontologies of the OntoLingAnnot annotation model. They show the different units, values, attributes, relations, layers and strata included in the discourse annotation level of the OntoLingAnnot model, within which these ontologies are included, used and evaluated