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

Genre-based analysis of the realisation of Concession in judicial discourse

The article aims to contribute a genre-based description of the realisation of Concession in EU judicial discourse. The analysis has been carried out on a corpus of judgments issued by the EU court of last instance, i.e. the European Court of Justice with the intention to identify the patterns and markers of Concession in judicial argumentation.In the analysis the author used the concept of Concession developed by Couper-Kuhlen and Thompson (1999, 2000) following the assumptions underlying Interactional Linguistics. The results revealed the most frequent patterns and markers of Concession in judicial discourse. At the same time, they led the author to the conclusion that the interactional model of Concession developed for analysing the spoken mode of language may successfully be applied in the examination of written data

Defeasible Rules in Content Selection and Text Structuring

This paper outlines a number of ways in which defeasible rules can contribute to the content selection and discourse structuring components of a text generation system. We suggest that, for certain types of descriptive text, the characterisation of discourse structuring mechanisms as operations on or involving defeasible rules provides an attractive framework for addressing important issues in content selection/structuring. We describe an architecture which incorporates defeasible rules into a systemic model of generation, and illustrate its use in the description of objects in a museum gallery. While defeasible rules are traditionally used in theorem-proving applications, to make predictions about the consequences of known facts, we are here concerned with three separate issues: (i) how such rules may need to be expressed by the NLG system in order to achieve its goals; (ii) how their interaction with facts about particular objects enables the use of valuable coherence relations; and ..

AMERICANO: Argument Generation with Discourse-driven Decomposition and Agent Interaction

Argument generation is a challenging task in natural language processing, which requires rigorous reasoning and proper content organization. Inspired by recent chain-of-thought prompting that breaks down a complex task into intermediate steps, we propose Americano, a novel framework with agent interaction for argument generation. Our approach decomposes the generation process into sequential actions grounded on argumentation theory, which first executes actions sequentially to generate argumentative discourse components, and then produces a final argument conditioned on the components. To further mimic the human writing process and improve the left-to-right generation paradigm of current autoregressive language models, we introduce an argument refinement module which automatically evaluates and refines argument drafts based on feedback received. We evaluate our framework on the task of counterargument generation using a subset of Reddit/CMV dataset. The results show that our method outperforms both end-to-end and chain-of-thought prompting methods and can generate more coherent and persuasive arguments with diverse and rich contents

Genre-based analysis of the realisation of concession in judicial discourse

The article aims to contribute a genre-based description of the realisation of Concession in EU judicial discourse. The analysis has been carried out on a corpus of judgments issued by the EU court of last instance, i.e. the European Court of Justice with the intention to identify the patterns and markers of Concession in judicial argumentation.In the analysis the author used the concept of Concession developed by Couper-Kuhlen and Thompson (1999, 2000) following the assumptions underlying Interactional Linguistics. The results revealed the most frequent patterns and markers of Concession in judicial discourse. At the same time, they led the author to the conclusion that the interactional model of Concession developed for analysing the spoken mode of language may successfully be applied in the examination of written data

Corpus-driven Semantics of Concession: Where do Expectations Come from?

                                                                                              Concession is one of the trickiest semantic discourse relations appearing in natural language. Many have tried to sub-categorize Concession and to define formal criteria to both distinguish its subtypes as well as for distinguishing Concession from the (similar) semantic relation of Contrast. But there is still a lack of consensus among the different proposals. In this paper, we focus on those approaches, e.g. (Lagerwerf 1998), (Winter & Rimon 1994), and (Korbayova & Webber 2007), assuming that Concession features two primary interpretations, "direct" and "indirect". We argue that this two way classification falls short of accounting for the full range of variants identified in naturally occurring data. Our investigation of one thousand Concession tokens in the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) reveals that the interpretation of concessive relations varies according to the source of expectation. Four sources of expectation are identified. Each is characterized by a different relation holding between the eventuality that raises the expectation and the eventuality describing the expectation. We report a) a reliable inter-annotator agreement on the four types of sources identified in the PDTB data, b) a significant improvement on the annotation of previous disagreements on Concession-Contrast in the PDTB and c) a novel logical account of Concession using basic constructs from Hobbs' (1998) logic. Our proposal offers a uniform framework for the interpretation of Concession while accounting for the different sources of expectation by modifying a single predicate in the proposed formulae

ChangeMyView Through Concessions: Do Concessions Increase Persuasion?

In Discourse Studies concessions are considered among those argumentative strategies that increase persuasion. We aim to empirically test this hypothesis by calculating the distribution of argumentative concessions in persuasive vs. non-persuasive comments from the the ChangeMyView subreddit. This constitutes a challenging task since concessions do not always bear an argumentative role and are expressed through polysemous lexical markers. Drawing from a theoretically-informed typology of concessions, we first conduct a crowdsourcing task to label a set of polysemous lexical markers as introducing an argumentative concession relation or not. Second, we present a selftraining method to automatically identify argumentative concessions using linguistically motivated features. While we achieve a moderate F1 of 57.4% via the self-training method, our subsequent error analysis highlights that the self training method is able to generalize and identify other types of concessions that are argumentative, but were not considered in the annotation guidelines. Our findings from the manual labeling and the classification experiments indicate that the type of argumentative concessions we investigated is almost equally likely to be used in winning and losing arguments. While this result seems to contradict theoretical assumptions, we provide some reasons related to the ChangeMyView subreddit

Connective-Lex: A Web-Based Multilingual Lexical Resource for Connectives

In this paper, we present a tangible outcome of the TextLink network: a joint online database project displaying and linking existing and newly-created lexicons of discourse connectives in multiple languages. We discuss the definition and demarcation of the class of connectives that should be included in such a resource, and present the syntactic, semantic/pragmatic, and lexicographic information we collected. Further, the technical implementation of the database and the search functionality are presented. We discuss how the multilingual integration of several connective lexicons provides added value for linguistic researchers and other users interested in connectives, by allowing crosslinguistic comparison and a direct linking between discourse relational devices in different languages. Finally, we provide pointers for possible future extensions both in breadth (i.e., by adding lexicons for additional languages) and depth (by extending the information provided for each connective item and by strengthening the crosslinguistic links).Nous présentons dans cet article un résultat tangible du réseau TextLink : un projet conjoint de base de données en ligne, qui montre et relie des lexiques, aussi bien existants que créés récemment, de connecteurs discursifs dans plusieurs langues. Nous commençons par considérer la définition et la délimitation de la classe des connecteurs qui devraient être inclus dans une telle ressource, et nous présentons l’information syntaxique, sémantico-pragmatique et lexicographique que nous avons recueillie. D’autre part, l’implémentation technique de cette base de données et les fonctionnalités de recherche qu’elle permet sont aussi décrites. Nous discutons de quelle manière l’intégration multilingue de plusieurs lexiques de connecteurs apporte une valeur ajoutée aux chercheurs en linguistique et aux autres utilisateurs qui s’intéressent aux connecteurs, en permettant de comparer plusieurs langues et de relier directement les connecteurs dans différentes langues. Pour finir, nous donnons des indications quant à une possible extension future en termes d’ampleur (par exemple, en ajoutant des lexiques pour de nouvelles langues) et de profondeur (en augmentant l’information qui est donnée pour chaque connecteur et en renforçant les liens entre lexiques)