Title: Graph representations of discourse structure

Authors: Elena Mitocariu

Addresses: SOP HRD/159/1.5/S/133675 Project, Romanian Academy Iasi Branch (POSDRU/159/1.5/S/133675), 2 Codrescu St., 700481, Romania; Faculty of Computer Science, 'Al.I.Cuza' University of Iasi, 16, General Berthelot St., 700483 – Iasi, Romania

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to introduce a new method to represent discourse structures. This approach is based on three discourse theories in order to highlight three discourse features: cohesion, coherence and intentionality. The graph representations of discourse structure proposed in this paper address linguistic discourse and chat conversation at the same time. The discourse units are chained to each other in order of their appearance in the text. Using such a representation, chronology of events is kept and highlighted. In graph representations of discourse structure two types of nodes describe the structure: nodes for elementary discourse units and cover nodes. Also, a method for traversing the graph is proposed and two expressions are introduced in order to discover the most important elementary discourse units from text. The paper describes a new graph-based model of discourse structure, building on a number of existing models such as the vein model and rhetorical structure theory. A main goal of the new model is the handling of multi-threaded discourse structures which are common in chat interactions. The operation of the model is demonstrated on one typical discourse and one chat discourse.

Keywords: graph representations; discourse structures; Veins Theory; chat representation; discourse features; chat segmentation; cohesion; coherence; intentionality; linguistic discourse; chat conversations; rhetorical structure theory.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAIP.2016.077490

International Journal of Advanced Intelligence Paradigms, 2016 Vol.8 No.3, pp.243 - 259

Received: 15 Nov 2014
Accepted: 03 Feb 2015
Published online: 04 Jul 2016 *

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