Discourse Processing
Discourse Processing

Author: Manfred Stede

Publisher: Morgan & Claypool Publishers

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1608457346

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Discourse Processing here is framed as marking up a text with structural descriptions on several levels, which can serve to support many language-processing or text-mining tasks. We first explore some ways of assigning structure on the document level: the logical document structure as determined by the layout of the text, its genre-specific content structure, and its breakdown into topical segments. Then the focus moves to phenomena of local coherence. We introduce the problem of coreference and look at methods for building chains of coreferring entities in the text. Next, the notion of coherence relation is introduced as the second important factor of local coherence. We study the role of connectives and other means of signaling such relations in text, and then return to the level of larger textual units, where tree or graph structures can be ascribed by recursively assigning coherence relations. Taken together, these descriptions can inform text summarization, information extraction, discourse-aware sentiment analysis, question answering, and the like. Table of Contents: Introduction / Large Discourse Units and Topics / Coreference Resolution / Small Discourse Units and Coherence Relations / Summary: Text Structure on Multiple Interacting Levels

Discourse Processing
Discourse Processing

Author: A. Flammer

Publisher: Elsevier

Published: 2000-04-01

Total Pages: 625

ISBN-13: 008086662X

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Research on discourse (or text) processing has only recently come into its own. It builds on the work of text analysis which has a long and distinguished history, but modern developments in psychology (e.g. memory research), artificial intelligence, linguistics and philosophy have contributed to this emergence in the last decade as a lively and promising research area.This book contains 46 selected and edited contributions from the International Symposium held in Fribourg in 1981, and represents a truly international overview of the developments in research on written and oral discourse. The contributions have been grouped according to problem area and not according to methodology, with the intention of focusing on the important issues in the field of discourse processing and of showing how diverse approaches contribute to a better understanding of the problems involved. The main themes are: text structure, coherence, inference, memory processes, attention and control, goal perspectives, and educational implications.

Challenges of Discourse Processing
Challenges of Discourse Processing

Author: Patrick Saint-Dizier

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-03-17

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1443857513

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Discourse analysis remains an unresolved challenge in Computational Linguistics, in spite of the numerous theoretical works that have been developed in the past two decades. This situation is mainly due to the complexity of discourse constructions whose recognition often involves language analysis associated with domain knowledge and reasoning. Technical documents, such as procedures, requirements, and product manuals, must be relatively constrained in terms of language diversity and complexity: the goal is to make sure that users can efficiently and accurately understand these documents. For that purpose, these documents often follow authoring guidelines. These constraints make it possible to develop an accurate discourse analysis of technical documents which can be used to model their contents and to improve their overall quality. This book shows that linguistic analysis and natural language processing methods can efficiently be used to automatically recognize the discourse structures of technical documents, independently of the industrial sector and activity that is considered. Furthermore, the book presents well-founded and concrete solutions, which can be deployed in industrial contexts for various types of applications. This book begins with a presentation of the different types of technical texts. Their structure is then developed in conjunction with a survey of a number of authoring guidelines developed in the industry. The TextCoop platform and the Dislog language, designed for discourse analysis, are then presented with a large number of concrete examples, allowing readers to develop their own applications. The book concludes with an in-depth investigation of the structure of procedures and requirements.

Language Processing in Discourse
Language Processing in Discourse

Author: Monika Doherty

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-09-02

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1134460562

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This book argues that language systems determine language use to a greater extent than is generally assumed. The author demonstrates how the typological characteristics of a language determine even the most general aspects of our stylistic preferences. Through extensive analysis of examples in German and English, the author demonstrates how analogous options of sentence structure must be surrendered in order to achieve felicitous translations. Two major aspects that determine the appropriateness of language use are examined: language processing and discourse-dependency. Essential reading for translation scholars and linguists involved in the comparative study of English and German, this book will also be of interest to scholars of psycholinguistics and cognitive science, as well as translators and linguists more generally.

Prolegomena to Inferential Discourse Processing
Prolegomena to Inferential Discourse Processing

Author: Roger Van de Velde

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1984-01-01

Total Pages: 110

ISBN-13: 9027280045

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This book shows that in reading verbal texts human reasoning is responsible for the recognition and construction of different forms of organization. On the one hand, it spells out in what ways human thinking succeeds in recognizing the surface form of grammatical organization which is characteristic of discourse expression (termed ‘cohesion’). On the other hand, it makes clear which human reasoning processes are involved in the construction of the different levels of organization which are characteristic of text content (termed ‘coherence’). Much attention is devoted to the hierarchical relationships between cohesion and coherence. In line with these hierarchizing endeavors, this book also addresses the related problem of whether the reasoning processes involved in reading verbal texts are ranked in order of importance. This book lends much weight to the empirical control of its claims. It does not only consider the language processing activities of normals, but it also devotes a great deal of attention to the disordered language reception activities of schizophrenics and aphasics.

Handbook of Discourse Processes
Handbook of Discourse Processes

Author: Arthur C. Graesser

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2003-04-02

Total Pages: 514

ISBN-13: 1135659273

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This Handbook is a comprehensive overview of the multidisciplinary field of discourse processes. The editors hope to foster a more interdisciplinary approach to discourse processing with this Handbook, while simultaneously developing an appreciation within the field for multiple methods of establishing rigorous scientific claims. The field of discourse processes is currently fueled by seven dominant approaches: * discourse psychology; * corpus analysis; * computational discourse; * discourse technologies; * conversation analysis; * hybrid qualitative and quantitative approaches; and * cultural foundations. The contributors also discuss future trends in research, including corpus analyses, the integration of neuroscience with discourse research, and the development of more advanced computer technologies for analyzing discourse.

The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Processes
The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Processes

Author: Michael F. Schober

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-22

Total Pages: 923

ISBN-13: 1317417976

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The second edition of The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Processes provides a state-of-the-art overview of the field of discourse processes, highlighting the subject’s interdisciplinary foundations and bringing together established and emergent scholars to provide a dynamic roadmap of the evolution of the field. This new edition reflects several of the enormous changes in the world since the publication of the first edition—changes in modes of communication and an increased urgency to understand how people comprehend and trust information. The contents of this volume attempt to address fundamental questions about what we should now be thinking about reading, listening, talking, and writing. The chapters collected here represent a wide range of empirical methods currently available: lab or field experiments, with a range of measures, from quantitative to qualitative; observational studies, including classrooms or organizational communication; corpus analyses; conversation analysis; computational modeling; and linguistic analyses. The chapters also draw attention to the explosion of contextually rich and computationally intensive data analysis tools which have changed the research landscape, along with more contemporary measures of people’s discourse use, from eye-tracking to video analysis tools to brain scans. The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Processes, Second edition is the ideal resource for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners in a variety of disciplines, including discourse analysis, conversation analysis, cognitive psychology, and cognitive science.

Trial Language
Trial Language

Author: Gail Stygall

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1994-11-10

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9027282846

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This study of Anglo-American legal discourse is the first comprehensive discourse analysis of American legal language in its prototypical setting, the trial by jury. With ethnographic data gathered in a civil jury trial, the book compares the discourse processing of the legal participants and the lay jurors in the trial.This study, examining an entire trial, finds that it is constraints at the level of a Foucauldian discursive formation that prevent lay understanding. Those constraints include the allocation of narrative speaking roles primarily to legal speakers in genres in which no sworn evidence is given, the suppression of narrative in ordinary witnesses, a set of restraints on witnesses' use of certain categories of evidentials, the legal topic originating in textual authority unknown to the lay participants, specific distribution of verb forms by legal genre, and a linguistic “burden” accompanying the legal “burden of proof” in the requirement that the lawyer of the moving party also use and explain technical legal terms to the jury at the same time as he or she presents evidence. All of these factors contribute to the incomprehensibility of legal discourse to lay auditors, resulting in the jury making their decision based on a commonsense script of the events precipitating the trial.The study concludes by arguing for a Foucauldian discourse analysis of institutional languages, a social theory powerful enough to account for the power and tenacity of these languages, where traditional linguistic explanation has failed.