William C. Mann’s research while affiliated with USC Institute for Creative Technologies and other places

... To gain deeper insight into the linguistic structure of these rubrics, we apply hierarchical discourse parsing and analyze the resulting discourse subgraphs-referred to as "discourse motifs"-which capture pragmatic discourse relations between textual units ranging from phrases to full paragraphs. This analysis builds on the method introduced by Kim et al. [2024], who used Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) [Mann and Thompson, 1987] to study discourse patterns in LLM-and human-generated texts. In our setting, we compute the distribution of discourse motifs across three versions of the rubric: the initial version, the version after a single MPO refinement, and the final version at the end of training. ...

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Toward Evaluative Thinking: Meta Policy Optimization with Evolving Reward Models

... The objective is to describe how the architecture of the advertising textual genre is organized, in interface with the proverb genre, and the relationships that emerge between their parts. The qualitative-interpretative analysis is based on the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) by Mann & Thompson (1983, 1985 and ...

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O GÊNERO TEXTUAL PROPAGANDA PUBLICITÁRIA: À LUZ DA TEORIA DA ESTRUTURA RETÓRICA (RST) E DA INTERTEXTUALIDADE

... Los conectores discursivos forman una categoría funcional de elementos léxicos que marcan relaciones discursivas, como la explicación o el contraste entre unidades discursivas (Halliday y Hasan, 1976;Mann y Thomson, 1992;Asher, 1993;Knott y Dale, 1994;Sanders, 1997). «Las conjunciones constituyen una clase de palabras invariables, generalmente átonas, que relacionan entre sí vocablos, grupos sintácticos u oraciones, unas veces equiparándolos y otras jerarquizándolos y haciéndolos depender unos de otros» (RAE, 2010, p. 604). ...

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Características de la explicitación de las relaciones lógicas en la traducción del chino al español y sus motivaciones

... In the "classical" RST (Mann and Thompson 1987;Mann, Matthiessen and Thompson 1992;Matthiessen and Thompson 1988 and later work), EDUs are considered to be clauses with the exception of clausal subjects and objects, other clausal complements and restrictive relative clauses. In the "modern" RST (Carlson et al. 2003), EDUs are clauses -including relative clauses -as well as attribution clauses and various phrases with strong discourse cues, such as because of, in spite of, according to. ...

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Text Structure in a Contrastive and Translational Perspective

... As the first layer of analysis, Rhetorical Structure Theory (e.g., Mann and Taboada, 2021;Mann, Matthiessen, and Thompson, 1992;Mann and Thompson, 1988) is adopted as 'a descriptive linguistic approach to a range of phenomena in the organisation of discourse' (Taboada and Mann, 2006: 424). The basic premise of RST is that a text is hierarchically organised by connecting parts of the text as a coherent whole instead of strings of sequiturs. ...

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Evaluative patterns in the concluding components of expounding essays: From the perspectives of Rhetorical Structure Theory and APPRAISAL

... There are many micro-discourse structure theories, including rhetorical structure theory, Pennsylvania discourse tree bank theory, sentence group theory, complex sentence theory, discourse structure theory based on connection dependency trees, etc. Among them, rhetorical structure theory (RST) [33] was founded by Mann and Thompson in 1986 and defined 23 structural relationships. When two or more discourse units are connected through rhetorical relationships, they constitute a structure tree. ...

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TOMDS (Topic-Oriented Multi-Document Summarization): Enabling Personalized Customization of Multi-Document Summaries

... On the other hand, recognizing textual entailment requires automated systems to identify when two spans of text share a common meaning; (ix) implicature (also called conversational implicature) is a pragmatic concept introduced by British philosopher (Grice 1975), which showed how meaning expressed by the speaker (speaker meaning) in conversation, not directly encoded in the words, maybe inferred (recognized) by the hearer; (x) discourse coherence, as defined by Jurafsky (2020), consists of a coherent structured group of sentences, in which the word "coherence" is used to refer to the relationship between sentences that makes real discourses different than just random assemblages of sentences. Furthermore, according to Mann et al. (1992), theories of discourse coherence, which were broadly defined as "the sense of overall unity of a text," are often used as descriptive tools in the analysis of coherence. ...

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Discourse annotation guideline for low-resource languages

... As we demonstrate, that leads to LLMs encoding representations of both the linguistic properties critical to conveying meaning in gesture performances, as well as the relation of those phenomena to actual gestures. Furthermore, we explore and evaluate LLMs' ability to represent rheme and theme [11,31], metaphor [7,13], image schemas [6] and rhetorical structures [29]. GPT4's ability is assessed in the context of crafting a specific individual, a skilled presenter from a labor organization. ...

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Large Language Models for Virtual Human Gesture Selection

... For this relation to hold, the satellite (2) must be a problem to which the nucleus (1) is a solution. That would be to say, senate membership among retired faculty is a Figure 18: Emeriti Committee RST analysis (Thompson and Mann 1987). ...

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Text as tautology: an exploration in inference, transitivity, and logical compression

... An early attempt at exploring the usefulness of RST in persuasive writing was undertaken by Mann and Matthiessen (1991), who noted that the primary goal of a written text functioned as the nucleus and the supplementary material that supported this goal were contained in the satellites. Later, Azar (1999) also confirmed that many RST relations were related to argumentation including evidence, justification, antithesis, and concessions. ...

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Argumentation features and essay quality: Exploring relationships and incidence counts