Rhetorical Structure Theory

In this paper, we address one of the central problems in text generation: the missing link ("the generation gap" in Meteer's terms) between the global discourse organization as often provided by text planning modules and the linguistic realization of this organization. We argue that the link should be established by the lexical choice proces s using resources derived from Mel'~uk's Lezical Functions (LFs). In particular, we demonstrate that sequences of LFs may well serve as lexical discourse structure relations which link up to global discourse relations in the output of a Rhetorical Structure Theory style text planner.

a r t í c u L o s La reseña de libros tiene, normalmente, tres secciones: presentación, descripción y resumen de contenido, y conclusión evaluativa, conformadas por una serie de movidas retóricas y pasos. En este artículo nos proponemos reconocer los rasgos lingüísticos que aportan uniformidad, señalan el contenido discursivo y delimitan los propósitos comunicativos locales en la sección Presentación de las reseñas de libros de lingüística. Para ello nos sustentamos teóricamente en el análisis de género desde una perspectiva retórica (Swales, 1990), y metodológicamente en el análisis textual con base en movidas y pasos, y en la investigación basada en corpus. El corpus de estudio está constituido por 20 reseñas de libros de lingüística escritas en español y publicadas en 4 revistas especializadas. Los criterios de análisis son las marcas textuales o rasgos lingüísticos (Gallardo, 2010), tales como formas prototípicas para introducir los distintos pasos, clase semántica de los verbos, marcadores discursivos y modalización. Como resultados tenemos que, dado el propósito comunicativo de la presentación, las

In the present paper, a genre-based conceptual framework for interpreting and designing content for learning objects is proposed. Learning objects are considered here as multimodal macrogenres. These macrogenres are constituted of content objects which are in fact types of digital microgenres. The successful and coherent information linking of these content objects inside a LO can be achieved through particular rhetorical relations. The knowledge of the several types of digital microgenres as well as the rhetorical relations ...

Some languages do not have enough labeled data to obtain good discourse parsing, specially in the relation identification step, and the additional use of unlabeled data is a plausible solution. A workflow is presented that uses a semi-supervised learning approach. Instead of only a predefined additional set of unlabeled data, texts obtained from the web are continuously added. This obtains near human perfomance (0.79) in intra sentential rhetorical relation identification. An experiment for English also shows improvement using a similar workflow.

We present an approach to content selection that works on an ontology-based knowledge base developed independently from the task at hand, i.e., Natural Language Generation. Prior to content selection, a stage akin to signal analysis and data assessment used in the generation from numerical data is performed for identifying and abstracting patterns and trends, and identifying relations between individuals. This new information is modeled as an extended ontology on top of the domain ontology which is populated via inference rules. Content selection leverages the ontology-based description of the domain and is performed throughout the text planning at increasing levels of granularity. It includes a main topic selection phase that takes into account a simple user model, a set of heuristics, and semantic relations that link individuals of the KB. The heuristics are based on weights determined empirically by supervised learning on a corpus of summaries aligned with data. The generated texts are short football match summaries that take into account the user perspective.

An iFAQ (intelligent Frequently Asked Questions) system designed to provide assistance to young judges at their first appointment is described. The development and use of legal domain ontologies is described. The functionality of the system is set out, along with the system architecture. The methodology and results of a system evaluation are also reported.

Abstract. In the IST project SEKT–Semantically Enabled Knowledge Technologies–one of the case studies [BCC+05] aims at providing an intelligent Frequently Asked Questions system, Iuriservice prototype II, that will offer help to newly appointed judges in Spain. This iFAQ uses ontology based Semantic Web technologies to retrieve FAQ to reply queries posed in natural language. In order to construct the underlying ontology, we used the ontology engineering methodology DILIGENT. DILIGENT [PTSS04] methodology is ...

The General Council of the Judiciary is the third power in Spain, and is responsible for the professional education of judges and for the operation of the judicial system. Becoming a judge in Spain requires passing an open, competitive exam, where many candidates apply and few are accepted. Having passed the exam, candidates immediately become judges, and have all of the corresponding obligations and responsibilities. Key Benefits of Using Semantic Web Technology Main benefits for the Spanish General Council of the Judiciary include Management of professional and pragmatic knowledge relevant for judges performing their daily jobs Fostering consistency in judges decisions based on an accumulation of relevant knowledge Shortening of time between newly appointed judges being aware of a situation and their corresponding action taking Knowledge management (retrieval of questions and jurisprudence) based on an "understanding" of the content rather than of keyword matching

During collaborative writing, shared documents are replicated on geographically distant sites. Each user works on an individual copy. This results in divergent copies. Merging techniques such as those proposed by the Operational Transformation (OT) approach reconcile the differences among the replicas and ensure their convergence. Although the merging techniques resolve conflicting syntax, they do not help preserve coherence which is an important aspect of an effective document. Therefore, we investigate the use of ideas from narrative-based writing to improve the coherence of the document during collaborative editing. Narrativebased writing is a new technique for planning documents that enhances the implicit story conveyed by a document to the readers; thereby improving coherence. This paper presents a discussion of this investigation.

During collaborative writing, shared documents are replicated on geographically distant sites. Each user works on an individual copy. This results in divergent copies. Merging techniques such as those proposed by the Operational Transformation (OT) approach reconcile the differences among the replicas and ensure their convergence. Although the merging techniques resolve conflicting syntax, they do not help preserve coherence which is an important aspect of an effective document. Therefore, we investigate the use of ideas from narrative-based writing to improve the coherence of the document during collaborative editing. Narrativebased writing is a new technique for planning documents that enhances the implicit story conveyed by a document to the readers; thereby improving coherence. This paper presents a discussion of this investigation.

Tesis doctoral en Lengua Finesa realizada por Johanna Komppa en la Universidad de Helsinki (HU) bajo la dirección del Dr. Jyrki Kalliokoski (HU) y la Dra. Susanna Shore (HU). El acto de defensa de la tesis tuvo lugar el viernes 31 de agosto de 2012 ante el tribunal formado por la Dra. Marja-Leena Kuronen (Aalto University School of Business), la Dra. Mirja Tarnanen (Universidad de Jyväskylä) y la Dra. Sanna Tanskanen (HU). La calificación obtenida fue 6 (eximia cum laude approbatur) en una escala de 1 (más bajo) - 7 (más alto).A PhD thesis in Finnish by Johanna Komppa at the University of Helsinki under the supervision of Professor Jyrki Kalliokoski (University of Helsinki) and Susanna Shore, docent at the University of Helsinki. The thesis was defended on 31 August 2012. The members of the defence committee were Dr. Marja-Liisa Kuronen (Aalto University School of Business), Professor Mirja Tarnanen (University of Jyväskylä) and Professor Sanna Tanskanen (University of Helsinki). Th...

This paper describes a pedagogical agent that helps children to learn to author structured presentations about explanations of concepts. Using a Rhetorical Structure Theory analysis of a source Web page, the agent performs pedagogical tasks to support the user's understanding of rhetorical relations, stimulates reflection about the relations between the structure of the original text and the structure of the presentations, and suggests ways to improve the user's performance. Upon completion of the authoring, the presentations are organized into coherent structures that can be performed by animated characters, or Digital Puppets, in a learning-by-teaching classroom context.

The study of research abstracts has gained significant scholarly attention as part of genre studies  due  to  the  communicative  importance  of  abstracts  in  constructing  academic knowledge.  This  study  contributes  to  the  discussion  by  examining  the  structural organization and lexico-grammatical features of ninety (90) postgraduate theses abstracts in the disciplines of English Language studies, Literature studies, and Linguistics studies (Ghanaian Languages). The abstracts were purposively sampled from the graduate theses of departments of the School of Languages, the University of Ghana. The data was analyzed using Hyland’s (2000) genre model of research abstracts. The findings reveal that abstracts of English Language studies and Linguistics studies (Ghanaian Languages) are often informative while Literature studies abstracts are more indicative and possess distinct structuring of the moves. The Purpose move (M2) remains obligatory and the Conclusion move (M5) is optional across the disciplines. Also, some lexico-grammatical features in the linguistic choices of scholars in the three disciplines point to evidential differences that mark informative abstracts as varying from indicative abstracts. The study concludes that identifying the discipline-specific function of the abstracts may be the best means to account for variations in abstracts of varying disciplines and calls for the deliberate enculturation of academics into discipline-oriented research writing skills to improve the presentation of research ideas in abstracts.

RESUMO: Propomos, neste trabalho, analisar como a hipotaxe adverbial pode contribuir para a construção da argumentatividade do gênero resposta argumentativa. Para isso, selecionamos como objeto de análise as produções textuais prototípicas dos candidatos ao vestibular de verão 2011 da Universidade Estadual de Maringá. Levando em consideração o panorama teórico do funcionalismo, investigou-se neste trabalho as funções textual-discursivas das orações adverbiais que funcionaram como valor de guia, ponte de transição, moldura, foco, função tópica dentre outras funções na articulação de orações que podem contribuir para a construção da argumentatividade do gênero resposta argumentativa. Como aporte teórico, aliamos estudos de funcionalistas como Mann & Thompson (1988); Matthiessen & Thompson (1988), da Teoria da Estrutura Retórica. De acordo com essa teoria, as relações retóricas dão coerência ao discurso, conferindo unidade e permitindo que o produtor atinja seus propósitos com o texto que produziu, ou seja, essa teoria fundamenta-se no princípio de que, no texto, além do conteúdo explícito, emergem proposições implícitas da combinação entre porções de texto.

Rhetorical structuring is field approached mostly by research in natural language (pragmatic) interpretation. However, in natural language generation (NLG) the rhetorical structure plays an important part, in monologues and dialogues as well. Hence, several approaches in this direction exist. In most of these, the rhetorical structure is calculated and built in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), or Centering Theory [7], [5]. In language interpretation, a more recent formal account of rhetorical structuring has emerged, namely Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), which alleviates some of the issues and weaknesses inherent in previous theories [1]. Research has been initiated in rhetorical structuring for NLG using SDRT, mostly concerning monologues [3]. Most of the approaches in using and / or approximating SDRT in computer implementations lean on dynamic semantics, derived from Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) in order to compute rhetorical relations [9]. Some efforts exist in approximating SDRT using less expressive (and expensive) logics, such as First Order Logic (FOL) or Dynamic Predicate Logic (DPL), but these efforts concern language interpretation [10]. This paper describes a rhetorical structuring component of a natural language generator for human-computer dialogue, using SDRT, approximated via the usage of FOL, doubled by a domainindependent discourse ontology. Thus, the paper is structured as follows: the first section situates the research in context and motivates the approach; the second section describes the discourse ontology; the third section describes the approximations done on vanilla SDRT, in order for it to be used for language generation purposes; the fourth section describes an algorithm for updating the discourse structure for a current dialogue; the fifth section provides a detailed example of rhetorical relation computation. The sixth section concludes the paper and gives pointers to future research and improvements.

The computerisation of clinical guidelines can greatly benefit from the automatic analysis of their content using Natural Language Processing techniques. Because of the central role played by specific deontic structures, known as recommendations, it is possible to tune the processing step towards the recognition of such expressions, which can be used to structure key sections of the document. In this paper, we extend previous work on the automatic identification of guidelines' recommendations, by showing how Rhetorical Structure Theory can be used to characterise the actual contents of elementary recommendations. The emphasis on causality and time in RST proves a powerful complement to the recognition of deontic structures and supports the identification of relevant knowledge, in particular for the identification of conditional structures, which play an important role for the subsequent analysis of recommendations.

In this paper, we extend previous work on the automatic structuring of medical documents using content analysis. Our long-term objective is to take advantage of specific rhetoric markers encountered in specialized medical documents (clinical guidelines) to automatically structure free text according to its role in the document. This should enable to generate multiple views of the same document depending on the target audience, generate document summaries, as well as facilitating knowledge extraction from text. We have established in previous work that the structure of clinical guidelines could be refined through the identification of a limited set of deontic operators. We now propose to extend this approach by analyzing the text delimited by these operators using Rhetorical Structure Theory. The emphasis on causality and time in RST proves a powerful complement to the recognition of deontic structures while retaining the same philosophy of high-level recognition of sentence structure, which can be converted into applicationspecific markups. Throughout the paper, we illustrate our findings through results produced by the automatic processing of English guidelines for the management of hypertension and Alzheimer disease.

Cet article 1 propose une approche hybride pour la segmentation de documents basée sur l'agrégation de différentes solutions. Divers algorithmes de segmentation peuvent être utilisés dans le système, ce qui permet la combinaison de stratégies multiples (spécifiques au domaine, supervisées et nonsupervisées). Un ensemble de documents étiquetés, segmentés au préalable et représentatif du domaine ciblé, doit être fourni pour être utilisé comme ensemble d'entraînement pour l'apprentissage des méthodes supervisées, et aussi comme ensemble de test pour l'évaluation de la performance de chaque méthode, ce qui déterminera leur poids lors de la phase d'agrégation. L'approche proposée présente de bonnes performances dans un scénario expérimental issu d'un corpus extrait du domaine juridique.

Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), which was originally developed by William C. Mann and Sandra A. Thompson as a functional theory to describe the text structure of written discourse, has been further advanced and incorporated into Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) by Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen. This study aims to introduce this new method to New Testament discourse analysis by integrating the features of New Testament Greek. This study also demonstrates the application of RST by conducting a rhetorical-relational analysis on John 8:31-59 to verify that RST can serve as an effective tool for New Testament interpretation and will offer new insights relevant to New Testament studies.

In this paper, we report the development and the performance of SenCept that acquires textual commonsense concepts to offer better contextualization for the domain DC electrical circuits. It uses a commonsense knowledge-base built upon a linguistic relations framework comprising Clause Level Relations, Sentential Roles, and Rhetorical Relations of a domain-specific corpus. SenCept selects representative commonsense knowledge using several parameters like knowledge weight and average commonsensical distances among knowledge. To extract commonsense concepts for any given sentence, the system uses the latter and the mean of distances among normalized weights of the representative sentences. The system is tested with a set of 100 random domain-specific sentences that are also given to five human subjects. Results show that SenCept achieves a precision and recall of 71.43 and 51.77 percent, respectively with an F-score of 60.03 percent.

Many text planning systems are based on a theoretical linguistic approach which assumes the existence of relations between units of text. The relational approach most extensively used in text generation is the Rhetorical Structure Theory (rtsw, Mann and Thompson 1987). The phenomenon of multiple relations, i.e. the fact that in natural language texts we often find more than one relation holding between two text units, has not been treated by RST. In this paper we show how the taxonomy of discourse structure relations as proposed in Maler and Hovy (1991) can be exploited to account for a subtype of multiple relations. We also give an outline of a computational model to generate texts including multiple relations.

Web searching is becoming more and more complex due to increased size of information on the web. Users have to face a lot of problems in specifying their needs in the form of query. Query Reformulation techniques are required in order to provide users with the results, according to their expectations. The existing reformulation techniques suffer from the problem of not providing users with expected results in all the cases because the mechanisms used behind those techniques are not much fine and accurate. A technique for query reformulation has been presented in this paper which is based on Cross-document Structure Theory (CST) and Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). A case study has been carried out to validate the proposed technique. The results are satisfactory as set of reformulated queries generated through this technique is semantically more close to the original query which ultimately provides more relevant data to the user.

Research on Question Answering is focused mainly on classifying the question type and flnding the answer, while presenting the an- swer in a way that suits the user's needs has received little attention. This paper shows how existing question answering systems can be improved by exploiting Rhetorical Structure Theory-based summarization techniques in or- der to extract more than just the exact answer from the document in which the answer resides. The output is an extensive answer, which also provides additional information related to the question, and which may give the user an op- portunity to assess the accuracy of the answer (is this what I am looking for?). A flrst exper- iment conflrms that the proposed summariza- tion method performs better than a baseline summarization method.

0 conectivo aditivo e empregado nao so para estabelecer conjuncao de conteudos, exercendo a funcao ideacional, representada pela camada da predicacao, mas tambem para estabelecer a conjuncao epistemica e a ilocucionaria, perfazendo a funcao interpessoal, que se acham representadas respectivamente nas camadas da proposicao e da frase no modelo de Gramatica Funcional (DIK, 1989, 1997). Alem do nivel intra-oracional, o conectivo atua tambem no nivel textual-interativo. A proposta deste trabalho e demonstrar, por um lado, que o quadro teorico da GF explica satisfatoriamente esse principio de multifuncionalidade detectado no uso e justificar, por outro, a necessidade de expansao de gramaticas sentenciais, incluindo a GF, para gramaticas do discurso.

Reasoning about how much to generate when space is limited is a challenge for generation systems. This paper presents two algorithms that exploit the discourse structure to decide which content to drop when there are space restrictions, in the context of producing documents from pre-authored text fragments. We analyse the effectiveness of both algorithms and show that the second is near optimal.

This thesis examines book reviews in the area of Applied Linguistics as an academic genre in terms of their communicative goal, overall rhetorical organization and the role lexis plays in the development and organization of such texts. The basic hypotheses of this study are twofold:

Résumé. Nous proposons une nouvelle approche pour le calcul de similarité sémantique entre phrases en utilisant les noyaux sémantiques qui les composent. Ces noyaux, sous la forme de triplets (sujet, verbe et objet) sont supposés porteurs de l’information des phrases dont ils sont extraits. Sur la base de la comparaison sémantique de noyaux, on extrait un ensemble d’indicateurs descriptifs. Nous utilisons ensuite un apprentissage automatique, sur un benchmark contenant des phrases dont la similarité sémantique a été évaluée par des experts humains, afin de déterminer l’importance de chaque indicateur et de construire ainsi un modèle capable de fournir une mesure de similarité sémantique entre phrases. Les expérimentations et les études comparatives, effectuées avec d’autres approches permettant l’estimation des similarités sémantiques entre phrases, montrent les bonnes performances de notre approche. En se basant sur cette dernière, un outil de navigation sémantique est en cours de ...

IX Congresso Brasileiro de Hispanistas realizado nos dias 22 a 25 agosto 2016Este trabalho investiga, à luz da Gramática DiscursivoFuncional (HENGEVELD e MACKENZIE, 2008), as orações denominadas pela tradição linguística de concessivocondicionais introduzidas por incluso si em dados do espanhol peninsular escrito, com a hipótese de que não existe o hibridismo proposto para esse tipo de oração. Autores como Flamenco García (1999), Neves (1999) e Rodríguez Rosique (2012) acreditam que essas estruturas são híbridas, localizandose entre a concessão e a condição, o que significaria, portanto, que essas orações contêm propriedades das duas categorias. Assim, na oração “Incluso si se lo pedimos por escrito, no nos lo devolverá” (FLAMENCO GARCÍA, 1999, p. 3842), a oração introduzida por incluso si compartilha com as concessivas a característica de apresentar um possível obstáculo (pedir por escrito) que não chega a impedir o que está expresso na oração principal (ele não nos devolverá); já ...

This paper describes a pedagogical agent that helps children to learn to author structured presentations about explanations of concepts. Using a Rhetorical Structure Theory analysis of a source Web page, the agent performs pedagogical tasks to support the user's understanding of rhetorical relations, stimulates reflection about the relations between the structure of the original text and the structure of the presentations, and suggests ways to improve the user's performance. Upon completion of the authoring, the presentations are organized into coherent structures that can be performed by animated characters, or Digital Puppets, in a learning-by-teaching classroom context.

Background: Computational linguistic methodology allows quantification of speech abnormalities in non-affective psychosis. For this patient group, incoherent speech has long been described as a symptom of formal thought disorder. Our study is an interdisciplinary attempt at developing a model of incoherence in non-affective psychosis, informed by computational linguistic methodology as well as psychiatric research, which both conceptualize incoherence as associative loosening. The primary aim of this pilot study was methodological: to validate the model against clinical data and reduce bias in automated coherence analysis. Methods: Speech samples were obtained from patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder, who were divided into two groups of n = 20 subjects each, based on different clinical ratings of positive formal thought disorder, and n = 20 healthy control subjects. Results: Coherence metrics that were automatically derived from interview transcripts significantly predicted clinical ratings of thought disorder. Significant results from multinomial regression analysis revealed that group membership (controls vs. patients with vs. without formal thought disorder) could be predicted based on automated coherence analysis when bias was considered. Further improvement of the regression model was reached by including variables that psychiatric research has shown to inform clinical diagnostics of positive formal thought disorder. Conclusions: Automated coherence analysis may capture different features of incoherent speech than clinical ratings of formal thought disorder. Models of incoherence in non-affective psychosis should include automatically derived coherence metrics as well as lexical and syntactic features that influence the comprehensibility of speech.

is a Lecturer at the University of Essex. She specialises in vocabulary studies and discourse coherence. Her current research examines academic vocabulary teaching and learning, figurative language processing, and the application of Rhetorical Structure Theory to language teaching.

In accord with the tradition of using idiosyncratic terminology, I will call them "coherence relations". On the Coherence and Structure of Discourse, Jerry R. Hobbs (1985) 1 What is a rhetorical relation? Let us start with an illustration. Below is a joke from the show Right Wing Comedian performed by the Britisch stand-up comedian Leo Kearse at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2018. 1 Obviously, this is not an arbitrary sequence of utterances. The listener or reader immediately recognises that the utterances hold together forming one meaningful whole. The way the utterances are related can be characterised in rational terms. In (1-a), Kearse's character states that he has sympathy for Donald Trump, and the subsequent clauses (1-b)-(1-f) provide an explanation of why he feels that way. Different parts of that explanation are also interrelated. (1-b) and (1-c) do no more than telling a story of Trump's presidential campaign, that is, they represent events taking place in a sequence. (1-d) represents an unexpected twist in the story: Trump winning the election against his own attempts not to (1-c), as also signaled by the contrastive conjunction but. (1-e) then presents a consequence, or result of Trump's victory (1-d). Finally, (1-f) draws a parallel between Trump's presidential campaign experience in the sequence (1-b)-(1-e) and the speaker's own experience of applying for jobs. (1) a. I've got some sympathy for Trump. b. He went for a job, c. tried to throw the interview d. but accidentally got it e. and now he hates it. f. Reminds me of every interview I had for jobs I didn't want when I was on benefits. We say that the different parts of the discourse in (1) are connected by means of rhetorical relations (henceforth RRs) such as Explanation, Narration, Contrast, Result and Parallel. The rhetorical structure of the discourse is represented schematically in Figure 1. More generally, the identification of RRs is a way (one way) to characterise the coherence of text and discourse. In the past three decades, research on RRs has come up with a variety of frameworks which differ in terms of both definition and inventory of RRs (cf. e.g. Hovy

Research on explanation is currently of intense interest as documented in the DARPA 2021 investments reported by the USA Department of Defense. An emerging theme for explanation techniques research is their application to the improvement of human-system interfaces for autonomous anti-drone or C-UAV defense systems. In the present paper a novel proposal based on natural language processing technology concerning explanatory discourse using relations is briefly described. The proposal is based on the use of relations pertaining to the possible malicious actions of an intruding alien drone swarm and the defense decisions proposed by an autonomous anti-drone system. The aim of such an interface is to facilitate the supervision that a user must exercise on an autonomous defense system in order to minimize the risk of wrong mitigation actions and unnecessary spending of ammunition.

The aim of this study is to discover how readers' expertise and experience of business news can influence their interpretation of online business news. The data was collected by interviews with one inexperienced reader who has no special interest in business news and one experienced newspaper reader who reads business newspapers regularly. The study is based on Bhatia's genre theory and critical discourse analysis. The findings show differences in interpretations between the two readers, which might be based on their different level of expertise on business issues. The inexperienced reader’s interpretation seemed “entrepreneurial, self-critical and searching for the correct meaning”, whereas the interpretation of the experienced reader seemed more “selective, analytical, deliberative and confident”. Both interpretations are uncritical, which might be the result of the combination of a specific genre (news), the subject (macroeconomic, unpolitical) as well as a certain degree...

Resumo: O objetivo do artigo é discutir a noção de discurso empregada em alguns modelos teóricos de base funcionalista que, em vários contextos, é confundida com a noção de discurso empregada em manuais acadêmicos da Análise do Discurso. Tal necessidade se justifica, no atual momento, em razão do desenvolvimento da nova versão da Gramática Funcional de Simon Dik, orientada para o discurso, conhecida como Gramática Discursivo-Funcional, que vem sendo desenvolvida por Kees Hengeveld

The integration into the tertiary curriculum of problem-based learning, and the growing awareness of the need for university graduates to enter the workforce with highly developed communication skills, has led to a greater focus in academic classrooms on oral communication. One aspect of this is the increased use of monologic student oral presentations tasks, a requirement that presents challenges for international and local students alike. There is little research beyond lexical features that centres on the rhetorical level in student presentations. This study attempts to characterise the rhetorical moves within undergraduate oral presentations. The data comprise transcribed presentations by local and international high-scoring students in core first-year undergraduate subjects in three different faculties (n=30). The methodology for the analysis was Rhetorical Structure Theory. The analysis, which distributed RST relations into those contributing to the presentation's coherence and listener-oriented comprehensibility, identified the range and frequency of rhetorical moves within the dataset. Differences across disciplines appeared to be due to task requirements rather than disciplinary requirements per se. To conclude, we discuss the value of Rhetorical Structure Theory in the analysis of oral student data and its potential to inform the preparation of students for formal academic spoken discourse.

The introduction of single fixed terms of office at the Swiss Federal Supreme Court leads to clustered departures of judges in certain legislative periods. A cyclical renewal of the court in equal parts would prevent such periodically clustered departures. At the same time, it would strengthen the democratic legitimacy of the Supreme Court.

We describe our experience in developing a discourse-annotated corpus for community-wide use. Working in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory, we were able to create a large annotated resource with very high consistency, using a well-defined methodology and protocol. This resource is made publicly available through the Linguistic Data Consortium to enable researchers to develop empirically grounded, discoursespecific applications.

Diagrams produced using Rhetorical Structure Theory can be both informative and engaging, providing insight into the properties of discourse structures and other coherence phenomena. This paper presents a deep dive into these diagrams and shows how an RST analysis can be reconceived as an emergent process. The paper describes an algorithm for transforming RST diagrams into Pythonic relational propositions and applies it to a set of RST analyses. The resulting expressions are isomorphic with RST diagrams as well as machine processable. As executable specifications of discourse structure, they support scalable applications in applied and theoretical studies. Several sample applications are presented. The transformation process itself suggests an alternative to the traditional view of rhetorical structures as recursive trees. The construction of coherence is shown to be a bottom-up synthesis, wherein discourse units combine to form relational propositions which in turn rendezvous with other relational propositions to create increasingly complex expressions until a comprehensive analysis is produced. This progressive bottom-up development of coherence is observable in the performance of the algorithm.

Guiding the behaviour of Intelligent Virtual Agents so that a pleasant and productive interaction is established with the user has been the aim of a very large body of research work. In this paper we propose that by basing this guidance on a set of attention indicators it is possible to define strategies to effectively guide IVA's behaviours.

Guiding the behaviour of Intelligent Virtual Agents so that a pleasant and productive interaction is established with the user has been the aim of a very large body of research work. In this paper we propose that by basing this guidance on a set of attention indicators it is possible to define strategies to effectively guide IVA's behaviours.