Adaptation of discourse parsing models for the portuguese language

Discourse parsing in Portuguese has two critical limitations. The first is that the task has been explored using only symbolic approaches, i.e., using manually extracted lexical patterns. The second is related to the domain of the lexical patterns, which were extracted through the analysis of a corpus of academic texts, generating many domain-specific patterns. For English, many approaches have been explored using machine learning with features based on a prominent lexicon-syntax notion of dominance sets. In this paper, two works were adapted to Portuguese, improving the results, outperforming the baselines and previous works for Portuguese, considering the task of rhetorical relation identification.São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) (grant 2014/11632-0)Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaUniversity of Toront

On the Development and Evaluation of a Brazilian Portuguese Discourse Parser

We present in this paper the development process and the evaluation procedure of a Brazilian Portuguese discourse parser called DiZer. Based on Rhetorical Structure Theory, DiZer is a symbolic cue phrase-based analyzer that makes use of discourse templates learned from a corpus of scientific texts to identify and build the discourse structure of texts. DiZer evaluation shows satisfactory results for scientific and news texts, even tough it was not designed for the latter, which demonstrates DiZer portability.Apresentamos neste artigo o processo de desenvolvimento e avaliação de um analisador discursivo automático para o português brasileiro. Seguindo a Teoria de Estruturação Retórica, o DiZer é um sistema simbólico baseado na ocorrência de marcadores textuais, fazendo uso de templates discursivos extraídos de um corpus de textos científicos para identificar a construir a estrutura discursiva de textos. A avaliação do DiZer mostra resultados satisfatórios para textos científicos e jornalísticos, apesar do sistema não ter sido delineado para o gênero jornalístico, o que demonstra a portabilidade do sistema

A narrative-based collaborative writing tool for constructing coherent technical documents

One important feature of an effective document that makes it easy to read and understand is known as coherence. Technical documents produced collaboratively are often incoherent due to a lack of group consensus and misaligned contributions by the individual authors. However, current document planning techniques and writing tools do not provide explicit support for improving coherence. The goal of this research, therefore, is to develop and evaluate a new technique and tool that helps teams of authors to structure coherent technical documents. The coherence of a document can be attributed to the story (or narrative) it conveys to the reader. If this story is consistent and coherent, the same can be said about the document. A discourse theory such as Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) that has been developed by linguists helps further to analyse and improve a narrative. RST explains the coherence of a text by virtue of relationships (such as “paragraph A justifies paragraph B”) between parts of the text. This research has combined the ideas from these parallel strands of research to develop a new document planning technique called narrative-based writing. The method involves writing down an explicit précis of the story (called a document narrative or DN) and then analysing it using RST. The DN and RST analysis are then used to structure the eventual document. To extend the usability of narrative-based writing to geographically-dispersed authors, I have designed and implemented a collaborative tool that allows co-authors to edit, analyse and review DNs. The thorough design for the tool uses a combination of three models (conceptual, business process and functional) culminating in a set of functions that enable collaborative narrative-based writing. This dissertation discusses how, in the future, these functions could be incorporated in existing collaborative writing tools. Implementing this tool, albeit in its current prototypic state, has been invaluable in understanding the complexities of modelling and manipulating DNs and RST structures. Initial investigations using the new technique and tool have been positive, encouraging me to continue the research and evaluation in this field.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo