Learning discourse-new references in portuguese texts

This work presents the evaluation of a discourse status classifier for the Portuguese language. It considers two distinguished classes of discourse novelty: Brand-new and New references. An evaluation of the relevant features according to different linguistic levels are presented in detail.IFIP International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Theory and Practice - Speech and Natural LanguageRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Learning discourse-new references in portuguese texts

This work presents the evaluation of a discourse status classifier for the Portuguese language. It considers two distinguished classes of discourse novelty: Brand-new and New references. An evaluation of the relevant features according to different linguistic levels are presented in detail.IFIP International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Theory and Practice - Speech and Natural LanguageRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Galileo's Revenge: ways of construing knowledge and translation strategies in the era of globalisation

Galileo’s fateful confrontation with the Holy Office in 1633 is often taken to mark the start of the Scientific Revolution, the moment when a whole new approach to knowledge began to take over the western world. Amongst the many repercussions of this great epistemological shift was the development of a new ‘transparent’ type of discourse, felt to reflect reality more directly than the elaborate verbal edifices of the Scholastics. Today, the ‘authoritative plain style’, as Lawrence Venuti calls it, is so prevalent in English academic and factual writing that knowledge configured otherwise is rarely allowed past the cultural gatekeepers. There are countries, however, where, for historical and cultural reasons, the Scientific Revolution never really took place. In Spain and Portugal, for example, the anthropocentric paradigm favoured by the Christian humanist tradition has persisted well into the 21st century, and as a result, many of the academic texts produced in these countries operate according to an entirely different philosophy of language. This paper discusses some of the linguistic and ideological problems of translating such scholarship into a form that is publishable in English

Cross-lingual RST Discourse Parsing

Discourse parsing is an integral part of understanding information flow and argumentative structure in documents. Most previous research has focused on inducing and evaluating models from the English RST Discourse Treebank. However, discourse treebanks for other languages exist, including Spanish, German, Basque, Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese. The treebanks share the same underlying linguistic theory, but differ slightly in the way documents are annotated. In this paper, we present (a) a new discourse parser which is simpler, yet competitive (significantly better on 2/3 metrics) to state of the art for English, (b) a harmonization of discourse treebanks across languages, enabling us to present (c) what to the best of our knowledge are the first experiments on cross-lingual discourse parsing.Comment: To be published in EACL 2017, 13 page

The written production of argumentative and dissertation text: a didactic project based on Bakhtin's philosophy

This article is characterized as a theoretical and practical research related to a project developed during the year 2015 in two schools - one public, the other private- , in the city of Birigui, State of São Paulo, Brazil. The main goal of the study was to analyze: the pedagogical project and the teachers’ activities oriented towards teaching and learning of argumentative and dissertation texts. The methodology used in this research comprised: (i) visiting both schools, (ii) producing a description of ongoing school practices, with focus on the teaching of argumentative and dissertation texts, (iii) suggesting a teacher’s activity to improve this apprenticeship, (iv) putting this activity into practice and (v) analyzing obtained results. The theoretical framework used for this study was the Bakhtinian philosophy (BAKHTIN, 2013; 2006a; 2006b; 2006c; 2006d; 2010; 2013; VOLOSHINOV, 1986). This theoretical approach was chosen due to the importance of comprehension of the text not just as an amalgamated set of words, phrases and paragraphs; other than that, we understand it as a structure of meaning, in which we encounter linguistic forms, ideologies and discursive stance. At last, we can say the results show that the argumentative texts render assistance to the development of the students’ argumentative competence and skill, that is, in their ability to argue and organize ideas in a communicative situation

Cross-lingual and cross-domain discourse segmentation of entire documents

Discourse segmentation is a crucial step in building end-to-end discourse parsers. However, discourse segmenters only exist for a few languages and domains. Typically they only detect intra-sentential segment boundaries, assuming gold standard sentence and token segmentation, and relying on high-quality syntactic parses and rich heuristics that are not generally available across languages and domains. In this paper, we propose statistical discourse segmenters for five languages and three domains that do not rely on gold pre-annotations. We also consider the problem of learning discourse segmenters when no labeled data is available for a language. Our fully supervised system obtains 89.5% F1 for English newswire, with slight drops in performance on other domains, and we report supervised and unsupervised (cross-lingual) results for five languages in total.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of ACL 201