Discourse Coherence

25.5 Global coherence

1. What is Propp’s model of folktale structure?
   A plot grammar of Russian folktales: character categories (dramatis personae: Hero, Villain, Donor, Helper) and functions (events like “Donor tests Hero”) that occur in a fixed order; each tale picks a subset of functions.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 25, §25.5, pp. 584–585
2. How were dramatis personae induced computationally (Bamman et al. 2013)?
   As latent personae from Wikipedia movie plot summaries, using what characters do (villains strangle), what is done to them (villains are foiled) and how they are described (villains are evil).
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 25, §25.5, p. 585
3. What are Aristotle’s three components of a good argument?
   Pathos (appeal to the listener’s emotions), ethos (appeal to the speaker’s character), logos (the logical structure). Argumentation mining has mostly studied logos.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 25, §25.5, p. 585
4. What do argumentation mining corpora annotate?
   Claims (central, controversial, needing support), premises (reasons supporting or attacking a claim or another premise), and argumentative relations like SUPPORT and ATTACK.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 25, §25.5, p. 585
5. Give the argument structure of: “(1) Museums provide a better understanding of arts than the Internet. (2) Museums give detailed descriptions of background and history. (3) Seeing an artwork online is not the same as seeing it with our own eyes, as (4) the picture online does not show texture or 3-D structure.”
   (1) is the claim; SUPPORT(2, 1), SUPPORT(3, 1), SUPPORT(4, 3).

   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 25, §25.5, p. 585
6. How do arguments differ from local coherence relations?
   They are much less local: a persuasive essay often has one main claim with premises spread throughout the text.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 25, §25.5, pp. 585–586
7. What do argument mining algorithms typically classify?
   Spans as claim, premise or non-argumentative, and span pairs as SUPPORT, ATTACK or neither; some work detects argumentation schemes (argument from example, from cause to effect, from consequences).
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 25, §25.5, p. 586
8. Which persuasion mechanisms from social science have been detected linguistically?
   Reciprocity (returning favors), social proof (following others), authority (influence of the powerful) and scarcity (valuing what is scarce), used to predict success of online requests, peer-to-peer lending and influence on social media.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 25, §25.5, p. 586
9. What is argumentative zoning?
   An annotation scheme (Teufel et al.) assigning each sentence of a scientific paper one of 15 rhetorical tags reflecting the paper’s knowledge claim, e.g. AIM, OWN METHOD, OWN RESULTS, USE, GAP/WEAK, SUPPORT, ANTISUPPORT; used to train sentence classifiers.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 25, §25.5, p. 587