Discourse analysis

86 paper cards from the Research library

What it is

Discourse analysis studies language beyond the single sentence: how the sentences of a text or a conversation hang together. A reader knows that «It was raining. We stayed in.» gives a cause and its result, though no word says so, and that «however» turns the next sentence against the last.

Computational discourse analysis makes that structure explicit. It marks the relations between clauses (cause, contrast, elaboration, sequence), the words that signal them, the topic as it moves through a text, and who is being talked about from one sentence to the next. Treebanks such as the Penn Discourse Treebank and frameworks such as Rhetorical Structure Theory give it data and labels.

How Mova does it

Mova reads a text as one discourse: the frames reader keeps its context from sentence to sentence, so each clause knows who acts, what came before and what came next, and a pronoun is resolved against the people already in the story. Discourse words such as «then», «also» and «again» are kept on the clause they belong to.

• Frames: who did what to whom, why, and what came next
• Pragmatics algorithms from the literature
• coref — following people through a text

The papers (86)

Cards with a measured or kept idea first, then by citations.

1. Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization — William C. Mann, Sandra A. Thompson, 1988 · 3853 citations
2. Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics — Craige Roberts, 2012 · 1919 citations
3. Centering: A Framework for Modeling the Local Coherence of Discourse — Barbara J. Grosz, Aravind K. Joshi, Scott Weinstein, 1995 · 1773 citations
4. The Penn Discourse TreeBank 2.0. — Rashmi Prasad, Nikhil Dinesh, Alan Lee, Eleni Miltsakaki et al., 2008 · 1106 citations
5. Building a Discourse-Tagged Corpus in the Framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory — Lynn Carlson, Daniel Marcu, Mary Ellen Okurovsky, 2001 · 584 citations
6. Sentence Level Discourse Parsing using Syntactic and Lexical Information — Radu Soricut, Daniel Marcu, 2003 · 402 citations
7. The Penn Discourse Treebank — Eleni Miltsakaki, Rashmi Prasad, Aravind Joshi, Bonnie Webber, 2004 · 307 citations
8. Automatic sense prediction for implicit discourse relations in text — Emily Pitler, Annie Louis, Ani Nenkova, 2009 · 276 citations
9. Using Syntax to Disambiguate Explicit Discourse Connectives in Text — Emily Pitler, Ani Nenkova, 2009 · 269 citations
10. Anaphora and Discourse Structure — Bonnie Webber, Matthew Stone, Aravind Joshi, Alistair Knott, 2003 · 246 citations
11. The CommitmentBank: Investigating projection in naturally occurring discourse — Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Mandy Simons, Judith Tonhauser, 2019 · 176 citations
12. CoNLL 2016 Shared Task on Multilingual Shallow Discourse Parsing — Nianwen Xue, Hwee Tou Ng, Sameer Pradhan, Attapol Rutherford et al., 2016 · 109 citations
13. Discourse Structure and Dialogue Acts in Multiparty Dialogue: the STAC Corpus — Nicholas Asher, Julie Hunter, Mathieu Morey, Farah Benamara et al., 2016 · 92 citations
14. Ma(r)king concessions in English and German — Brigitte Grote, Nils Lenke, Manfred Stede, 1995 · 92 citations
15. Reflections on the Penn Discourse TreeBank, Comparable Corpora, and Complementary Annotation — Rashmi Prasad, Bonnie Webber, Aravind Joshi, 2014 · 91 citations
16. How much progress have we made on RST discourse parsing? A replication study of recent results on the RST-DT — Mathieu Morey, Philippe Muller, Nicholas Asher, 2017 · 74 citations
17. The discourse commitments of illocutionary reportatives — Martina T Faller, 2019 · 70 citations
18. Discourse Relations: A Structural and Presuppositional Account Using Lexicalised TAG — Bonnie Webber, Alistair Knott, Matthew Stone, Aravind Joshi, 1999 · 56 citations
19. Discourse Markers in Speech: Distinctive Features and Corpus Annotation — Ludivine Crible, Maria-Josep Cuenca, 2017 · 51 citations
20. A Multi-Level Account of Cleft Constructions in Discourse — J. L. Delin, 1990 · 45 citations
21. A Dependency Perspective on RST Discourse Parsing and Evaluation — Mathieu Morey, Philippe Muller, Nicholas Asher, 2018 · 44 citations
22. A Framework for Annotating Information Structure in Discourse — Sasha Calhoun, Malvina Nissim, Mark Steedman, Jason Brenier, 2005 · 44 citations
23. SciDTB: Discourse Dependency TreeBank for Scientific Abstracts — An Yang, Sujian Li, 2018 · 42 citations
24. Joint Syntacto-Discourse Parsing and the Syntacto-Discourse Treebank — Kai Zhao, Liang Huang, 2017 · 39 citations
25. Discourse particles in early English: Clause structure, pragmatics and discourse management — Ans van Kemenade, Meta Links, 2020 · 37 citations
26. Constructing a Lexicon of English Discourse Connectives — Debopam Das, Tatjana Scheffler, Peter Bourgonje, Manfred Stede, 2018 · 37 citations
27. Implicit Discourse Relation Classification: We Need to Talk about Evaluation — Najoung Kim, Song Feng, Chulaka Gunasekara, Luis Lastras, 2020 · 33 citations
28. Resolving Discourse Deictic Anaphora in Dialogues — Miriam Eckert, Michael Strube, 1999 · 30 citations
29. Merging PropBank, NomBank, TimeBank, Penn Discourse Treebank and Coreference — James Pustejovsky, Adam Meyers, Martha Palmer, Massimo Poesio, 2005 · 26 citations
30. The DISRPT 2019 Shared Task on Elementary Discourse Unit Segmentation and Connective Detection — Amir Zeldes, Debopam Das, Erick Galani Maziero, Juliano Antonio et al., 2019 · 24 citations
31. The CODI-CRAC 2021 Shared Task on Anaphora, Bridging, and Discourse Deixis in Dialogue — Sopan Khosla, Juntao Yu, Ramesh Manuvinakurike, Vincent Ng et al., 2021 · 22 citations
32. New Perspectives in Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew — Aaron D. Hornkohl, Geoffrey Khan, 2021 · 21 citations
33. Categories of coherence relations in discourse annotation — Merel C.J. Scholman, Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul, Ted J.M. Sanders, 2016 · 21 citations
34. Discourse Annotation in the PDTB: The Next Generation — Rashmi Prasad, Bonnie Webber, Alan Lee, 2018 · 19 citations
35. QUD-Based Annotation of Discourse Structure and Information Structure: Tool and Evaluation — Kordula De Kuthy, Nils Reiter, Arndt Riester, 2018 · 14 citations
36. Towards Generating Text from Discourse Representation Structures — Valerio Basile, Johan Bos, 2011 · 14 citations
37. GumDrop at the DISRPT2019 Shared Task: A Model Stacking Approach to Discourse Unit Segmentation and Connective Detection — Yue Yu, Yilun Zhu, Yang Liu, Yan Liu et al., 2019 · 11 citations
38. Dependency Parsing for Spoken Dialog Systems — Sam Davidson, Dian Yu, Zhou Yu, 2019 · 10 citations
39. Antecedent Selection for Sluicing: Structure and Content — Pranav Anand, Daniel Hardt, 2016 · 10 citations
40. eRST: A Signaled Graph Theory of Discourse Relations and Organization — Amir Zeldes, Tatsuya Aoyama, Yang Janet Liu, Siyao Peng et al., 2025 · 9 citations
41. A Discourse Signal Annotation System for RST Trees — Luke Gessler, Yang Liu, Amir Zeldes, 2019 · 9 citations
42. DisSim: A Discourse-Aware Syntactic Text Simplification Framework for English and German — Christina Niklaus, Matthias Cetto, André Freitas, Siegfried Handschuh, 2019 · 9 citations
43. Usage patterns in the development of Hebrew grammatical subjects — Elitzur Dattner, Liron Kertes, Racehli Zwilling, Dorit Ravid, 2019 · 9 citations
44. A Lexicon-Based Approach for Detecting Hedges in Informal Text — Jumayel Islam, Lu Xiao, Robert E. Mercer, 2020 · 8 citations
45. Beyond The Wall Street Journal: Anchoring and Comparing Discourse Signals across Genres — Yang Liu, 2019 · 8 citations
46. A Discourse-Functional Description of Participant Reference in Biblical Hebrew Narrative — Steven E. Runge, 2007 · 8 citations
47. Evaluating Text Generation from Discourse Representation Structures — Chunliu Wang, Rik van Noord, Arianna Bisazza, Johan Bos, 2021 · 7 citations
48. Text Generation from Discourse Representation Structures — Jiangming Liu, Shay B. Cohen, Mirella Lapata, 2021 · 7 citations
49. Discourse Analysis via Questions and Answers: Parsing Dependency Structures of Questions Under Discussion — Wei-Jen Ko, Yating Wu, Cutter Dalton, Dananjay Srinivas et al., 2023 · 6 citations
50. Opinion Piece: Can we Fix the Scope for Coreference? Problems and Solutions for Benchmarks beyond OntoNotes — Amir Zeldes, 2022 · 6 citations
51. The DISRPT 2023 Shared Task on Elementary Discourse Unit Segmentation, Connective Detection, and Relation Classification — Chloé Braud, Yang Janet Liu, Eleni Metheniti, Philippe Muller et al., 2023 · 5 citations
52. DRS at MRP 2020: Dressing up Discourse Representation Structures as Graphs — Lasha Abzianidze, Johan Bos, Stephan Oepen, 2020 · 5 citations
53. Using Speech Acts in Logic-Based Rhetorical Structuring for Natural Language Generation in Human-Computer Dialogue — Vladimir Popescu, Jean Caelen, Corneliu Burileanu, 2007 · 5 citations
54. Fine-grained Information Status Classification Using Discourse Context-Aware BERT — Yufang Hou, 2020 · 4 citations
55. An overview of recent developments in the description of Biblical Hebrew relevant to Bible translation — Christo H. J. van der Merwe, 2004 · 4 citations
56. Focusing for Pronoun Resolution in English Discourse: An Implementation — Ebru Ersan, Varol Akman, 1994 · 4 citations
57. QUDeval: The Evaluation of Questions Under Discussion Discourse Parsing — Yating Wu, Ritika Mangla, Greg Durrett, Junyi Jessy Li, 2023 · 3 citations
58. Revisiting Shallow Discourse Parsing in the PDTB-3: Handling Intra-sentential Implicits — Zheng Zhao, Bonnie Webber, 2021 · 3 citations
59. Variation in Coreference Strategies across Genres and Production Media — Berfin Aktaş, Manfred Stede, 2020 · 3 citations
60. Modelling the Usage of Discourse Connectives as Rational Speech Acts — Frances Yung, Kevin Duh, Taku Komura, Yuji Matsumoto, 2016 · 3 citations
61. Towards a discourse-pragmatic description of left-dislocation in biblical Hebrew — Josh Westbury, 2010 · 3 citations
62. DiscoGeM: A Crowdsourced Corpus of Genre-Mixed Implicit Discourse Relations — Merel Scholman, Tianai Dong, Frances Yung, Vera Demberg, 2022 · 2 citations
63. The Biblical Hebrew particle kî from a discourse analysis perspective — Antonella Benigni, 2022 · 2 citations
64. Semantic mapping of participants in legal discourse — Christian Canu Højgaard, 2019 · 2 citations
65. Aspect-Switching and Subordination: the Role of It-Clefts in Discourse — Judy Delin, Jon Oberlander, 1992 · 2 citations
66. Dependency Dialogue Acts — Annotation Scheme and Case Study — Jon Z. Cai, Brendan King, Margaret Perkoff, Shiran Dudy et al., 2023 · 1 citations
67. Mapping Explicit and Implicit Discourse Relations between the RST-DT and the PDTB 3.0 — Nelson Filipe Costa, Nadia Sheikh, Leila Kosseim, 2023 · 1 citations
68. The First Shared Task on Discourse Representation Structure Parsing — Lasha Abzianidze, Rik van Noord, Hessel Haagsma, Johan Bos, 2019 · 1 citations
69. The Pragmatics of Indirect Commands in Collaborative Discourse — Matthew Lamm, Mihail Eric, 2017 · 1 citations
70. Anaphora and Deixis in Tiberian Hebrew: Semantically Mapping the Case for a Distance-Neutral Demonstrative — David Kummerow, 2014 · 1 citations
71. Discourse Structure, Verb Forms, and Archaism in Psalm 18 — Robert E. Longacre, 2006 · 1 citations
72. Va'yehi as a Discourse Marker in Kings — Tarsee Li, 2006 · 1 citations
73. The Verbal System of Classical Hebrew in the Joseph Story: An Approach from Discourse Analysis — Yoshinobu Endo, 1993 · 1 citations
74. A Survey of QUD Models for Discourse Processing — Yingxue Fu, 2025
75. Discourse structure and narration: A diachronic view from Germanic — Ulrike Demske, Barthe Bloom, 2025
76. Is It \textit JUST Semantics? A Case Study of Discourse Particle Understanding in LLMs — William Sheffield, Kanishka Misra, Valentina Pyatkin, Ashwini Deo et al., 2025
77. Unpacking Ambiguity: The Interaction of Polysemous Discourse Markers and Non-DM Signals — Jingni Wu, Amir Zeldes, 2025
78. GDTB: Genre Diverse Data for English Shallow Discourse Parsing across Modalities, Text Types, and Domains — Yang Janet Liu, Tatsuya Aoyama, Wesley Scivetti, Yilun Zhu et al., 2024
79. Encoding Discourse Structure: Comparison of RST and QUD — Sara Shahmohammadi, Hannah Seemann, Manfred Stede, Tatjana Scheffler, 2023
80. The CODI-CRAC 2022 Shared Task on Anaphora, Bridging, and Discourse Deixis in Dialogue — Juntao Yu, Sopan Khosla, Ramesh Manuvinakurike, Lori Levin et al., 2022
81. Combined discourse representations: Coherence relations and questions under Discussion — Arndt Riester, Amalia Canes Nápoles, Jet Hoek, 2021
82. Multiword expressions as discourse markers in Hebrew and Lithuanian — Giedre Valunaite Oleskeviciene, Chaya Liebeskind, 2021
83. Comparing PTB and UD information for PDTB discourse connective identification — Kelvin Han, Phyllicia Leavitt, Srilakshmi Balard, 2020
84. Towards a complex analysis of Wayihî + T constructions in Biblical Hebrew — Josh Westbury, Alexander Andrason, 2018
85. CogNIAC: A Discourse Processing Engine — Breck Baldwin, 1995
86. Intentions, Information, and Inference: Two Rhetorical Questions — Jon Oberlander, 1993

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