Discourse & Pragmatics

How language works above the sentence level. RST for text organization, cohesion and coherence for connectivity, speech acts for what utterances do, and politeness theory for navigating social face.

Rhetorical Structure Theory

Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a Functional Theory of Text Organization

Mann & Thompson, 1988 · Text 8(3) · The foundational RST paper

RST Website (SFU)

Comprehensive RST resources, tutorials, and bibliography

Building a Discourse-Tagged Corpus in the Framework of RST

Carlson et al., 2001 · RST Discourse Treebank

Neural RST Discourse Parsing

Ji & Eisenstein, ACL 2017

Cohesion & Coherence

Cohesion in English

Halliday & Hasan, 1976 · The foundational text

Lexical Cohesion Computed by Thesaural Relations

Morris & Hirst, 1991 · Computational Linguistics

Modeling Local Coherence: An Entity-Based Approach

Barzilay & Lapata, 2008 · Entity grid model

Attention, Intentions, and the Structure of Discourse

Grosz & Sidner, 1986 · Computational Linguistics · Classic discourse model

Centering: A Framework for Modeling Local Coherence

Grosz, Joshi, Weinstein, 1995 · Reference tracking

Penn Discourse Treebank

The Penn Discourse Treebank 2.0

Prasad et al., LREC 2008 · Standard discourse annotation

PDTB 3.0

LDC · Latest release with expanded annotation

Implicit Discourse Relation Classification

Ji et al., NAACL 2016

Speech Acts & Pragmatics

Speech Acts (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Authoritative overview of Austin and Searle

A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts

Searle, 1976 · The standard classification

A Computational Approach to Politeness

Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al., ACL 2013 · Wikipedia/StackExchange corpus

Politeness Theory

Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage

Brown & Levinson, 1987 · Cambridge · The foundational face theory

On Face-Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction

Goffman, 1955 · Psychiatry 18(3) · Origin of "face" concept

Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence

Culpeper, 2011 · Cambridge

Narrative Structure

Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience

Labov & Waletzky, 1967 · The Labovian framework

The Transformation of Experience in Narrative Syntax

Labov, 1972 · Language in the Inner City

Inducing Domain-Specific Semantic Class Taggers from Narrative

Chambers & Jurafsky, 2013 · Computational narratology

Discourse Markers

Discourse Markers

Schiffrin, 1987 · Cambridge · The foundational study

Discourse Markers: Language, Meaning, and Context

Fraser, 1999 · Journal of Pragmatics 31

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