Paragraph Boundaries Research Articles

Paragraph boundaries and discourse genre: Applying Lexical Priming to Spanish written texts

Lexical Priming (LP, o imprimación léxica) es el nombre de la toería lingüística desarrollada por el lingüísta británico Michael Hoey (cf. Hoey 2005 y 2013), en la que ciertos conceptos de la lingüística de corpus como colocación y coligación se han puesto en relación hallazgos experimentales de la psicolingüística en los procesos de asociación de palabras. La teoría trata sobre la imprimación léxica, gramatical y textual y puede ser considerada como particularmente adecuada para la investigación de ciertos fenómenos de la organización textual como , por ejemplo, los límites de párrafo. Utilizando ideas básicas de LP y métodos de la lingüística de corpus, este estudio investiga los límites del párrafo y su relación con el concepto de género discursivo. El objetivo principal es descubrir patrones lingüísticos recurrentes en la posición inicial de párrafo en unos géneros discursivos seleccionados del español escrito y con la ayuda de la herramienta de procesamiento textual Sketch Engine. En esta contribución, se explora un conjunto de segmentos lingüísticos, colocaciones léxicas y coligaciones gramaticales, que aparecen de manera frecuente a principio de párrafo de los textos seleccionados, de carácter más general o específico, y se identifican algunos patrones de cohesión y demás tendencias en los géneros examinados. Las posiciones de principio de párrafo en textos son puntos especiales y sensibles en los que el escritor necesita considerar cuál es el elemento más adecuado dependiendo de una serie de factores, entre los que la elección del género es uno de los más importantes. Este artículo pretende contribuir demostrar que el género es un asunto central en los estudios del uso de la lengua basados en corpus y a descartar una visión de la descripción lingüística donde las lenguas son consideradas como un todo homogéneo (Berber Sardinha 2017: 224)

EsCorpius-m: A Massive Multilingual Crawling Corpus with a Focus on Spanish

In recent years, transformer-based models have played a significant role in advancing language modeling for natural language processing. However, they require substantial amounts of data and there is a shortage of high-quality non-English corpora. Some recent initiatives have introduced multilingual datasets obtained through web crawling. However, there are notable limitations in the results for some languages, including Spanish. These datasets are either smaller compared to other languages or suffer from lower quality due to insufficient cleaning and deduplication. In this paper, we present esCorpius-m, a multilingual corpus extracted from around 1 petabyte of Common Crawl data. It is the most extensive corpus for some languages with such a level of high-quality content extraction, cleanliness, and deduplication. Our data curation process involves an efficient cleaning pipeline and various deduplication methods that maintain the integrity of document and paragraph boundaries. We also ensure compliance with EU regulations by retaining both the source web page URL and the WARC shared origin URL.

<p>Young EFL learners' pausing behavior: exploring pause thresholds in two proficiency levels</p>

The study of pausological behavior in L2 writing has been a matter of interest in recent years (see Lindgren & Sullivan, 2019), leading to a number of empirical studies which have explored pausing behavior from different angles. Among the many elements of pausological behavior, the pause threshold has aroused controversy in recent years (Alves et al., 2008) given its role in helping to discern lower-level and higher-level cognitive processes associated with L2 writing. While the research intent has focused recently on observing how pausological behavior varies according to the pause thresholds in adult L2 writers (Medimorec & Risko, 2017), this element of writing has not been examined in children L2 writers. For that purpose, this study analyzes pausological behavior and transcription fluency based on a picture-based story task by children L2 writers. Results indicate that pauses at word boundaries were more frequent than at sentence or paragraph boundaries. Likewise, the text boundary effect was not fully replicated, contrary to what studies in adult L2 writers have shown (see Wengelin, 2007).

Zone-Flooding as a Discursive Strategy of Czech Anti-System News Portals

Abstract: The anti-system media (ANTS)—known for spreading disinformation—might seem to "flood [the media] zone" with a chaotic multitude of information: truths, untruths, and half-truths alike. The main goal of this study is to find evidence of systematicity in this seeming chaos: persistent and recurring narrative lines that run through the media class irrespective of the news topic. Two empirical methods (Keyword Analysis and Market Basket Analysis) are applied to large data from Czech online media (all articles, regardless of topic, from 40 ANTS web portals over three months in 2020). ANTS' narratives are advanced by creating specific associations. The current approach is based on the idea that texts can be characterized with the help of conceptual associations, pursuing concepts which co-occur within the same text regardless of sentence or paragraph boundaries. This approach thus differs from the frequently-used strategy in discourse analysis of examining phenomena such as collocations, use of passive voice, or nominalization. The distinct properties of ANTS can be highlighted by contrasting it to the mainstream media class and to reader expectations in journalistic practice. The results, culled from servers including those not explicitly sponsored by the Kremlin, indicate that a schematic set of narrative lines permeate ANTS: a model of the world divided into the West (USA, NATO, and the EU) and Russia, in which the West has a negative image relative to that of Russia. These narrative lines lead to an argumentation for Czechia's separation from the West (Czexit, leaving NATO) and for alignment with Russia.

Second Language Learners’ Pauses Over Different Times Intervals in L2 Writing Essays: Evidence From a Keystroke Logging Program

Purpose. Several studies have been conducted to analyse students’ pauses during first language and/or second language writing to indicate the magnitude of the underlying cognitive processes learners have. Majority of studies have examined students’ pauses at a threshold 200ms. However, little is known about recording second language learners' pauses at different pauses’ times over different types of genres. The current investigation reports a case study of L2 learners’ cognitive processes by recording their pauses (<500ms, <1000ms, and <2000ms) during L2 writing in response to multiple genres prompts. 
 Design / methodology / approach. Twenty-five postgraduate students were asked to write three essays over three weeks, and their writing processes were recorded using a keystroke logging program (Inputlog, 7, Leijten & van Waes, 2013). Data was triangulated using a log file from the keystroke logging program, a process graph for writing behavior through different stages, and a visual video recording of their captured screens during writing behaviours. 
 Findings. Results found that the students paused over sentence and paragraph boundaries and their pauses between paragraphs were significantly higher in writing narrative essay than in their argumentative essays at pauses intervals <500 and <1000ms respectively, and in turn, their pauses between sentences in an argumentative essay were significantly higher than their pauses in a descriptive essay at <500, <1000 respectively. However, there were no significant differences across word boundaries over genre types. 
 Conclusions. The current study extends the previous literature in examining the underlying cognitive processes during L2 writing tasks as the trendy issue of psycholinguistics. Knowing the cognitive processes is crucial in diagnosing the students’ difficulties in writing L2 essays as advanced technology has the potential to explore intrusively the accurate cognitive processes learners involved during writing tasks.
 Originality / value. This paper is innovative in examining a state-of-the-art issue and has implications to the field of psycholinguistics.

Discourse Relations and Connectives in Higher Text Structure

The present article investigates possibilities and limits of local (shallow) analysis of discourse coherence with respect to the phenomena of global coherence and higher composition of texts. We study corpora annotated with local discourse relations in Czech and partly in English to try and find clues in the local annotation indicating a higher discourse structure. First, we classify patterns of subsequent or overlapping pairs of local relations, and hierarchies formed by nested local relations. Special attention is then given to relations crossing paragraph boundaries and their semantic types, and to paragraph-initial discourse connectives. In the third part, we examine situations in which annotators incline to marking a large argument (larger than one sentence) of a discourse relation even with a minimality principle annotation rule in place. Our analyses bring (i) new linguistic insights regarding coherence signals in local and higher contexts, e.g. detection and description of hierarchies of local discourse relations up to 5 levels in Czech and English, description of distribution differences in semantic types in cross-paragraph and other settings, identification of Czech connectives only typical for higher structures, or the detection of prevalence of large left-sided arguments in locally annotated data; (ii) as another type of contribution, some new reflections on methodologies of the approaches under scrutiny.

Paragraph Boundary Recognition in Novels for Story Understanding

The understanding of narrative stories by computer is an important task for their automatic generation. To date, high-performance neural-network technologies such as BERT have been applied to tasks such as the Story Cloze Test and Story Completion. In this study, we focus on the text segmentation of novels into paragraphs, which is an important writing technique for readers to deepen their understanding of the texts. This type of segmentation, which we call “paragraph boundary recognition”, can be considered to be a binary classification problem in terms of the presence or absence of a boundary, such as a paragraph between target sentences. However, in this case, the data imbalance becomes a bottleneck because the number of paragraphs is generally smaller than the number of sentences. To deal with this problem, we introduced several cost-sensitive loss functions, namely. focal loss, dice loss, and anchor loss, which were robust for imbalanced classification in BERT. In addition, introducing the threshold-moving technique into the model was effective in estimating paragraph boundaries. As a result of the experiment on three newly created datasets, BERT with dice loss and threshold moving obtained a higher F1 than the original BERT had using cross-entropy loss as its loss function (76% to 80%, 50% to 54%, 59% to 63%).

Hierarchical Macro Discourse Parsing Based on Topic Segmentation

Hierarchically constructing micro (i.e., intra-sentence or inter-sentence) discourse structure trees using explicit boundaries (e.g., sentence and paragraph boundaries) has been proved to be an effective strategy. However, it is difficult to apply this strategy to document-level macro (i.e., inter-paragraph) discourse parsing, the more challenging task, due to the lack of explicit boundaries at the higher level. To alleviate this issue, we introduce a topic segmentation mechanism to detect implicit topic boundaries and then help the document-level macro discourse parser to construct better discourse trees hierarchically. In particular, our parser first splits a document into several sections using the topic boundaries that the topic segmentation detects. Then it builds a smaller and more accurate discourse sub-tree in each section and sequentially forms a whole tree for a document. The experimental results on both Chinese MCDTB and English RST-DT show that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines significantly.

Analyses of L2 Learners' Text Writing Strategy: Process-Oriented Perspective.

Second language writing researchers have examined the affordances of Automated Writing Evaluation programs in providing immediate feedback that helps improve students' writing outputs. However, a little is known about tracking learners' process during writing essays and whether much/less pauses made by learners could predict good/poor quality of students' writing output. This article aims to address this issue by recording a case study of 8 postgraduate students' pauses during writing two types of text genre; descriptive and argumentative essays. Their pauses have been recorded using Keystroke logging program-Input Log 7.0 (Leijten and Van Waes in Writ Commun 30:358-392, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088313491692) and their screen activities were captured by Active Presenter program. Findings revealed that the students' pauses were significantly higher in word boundary than in sentence and/or paragraph boundaries. Moreover, on word boundary, pauses before words were significantly higher than that after words for both types of text genre. Concerning pauses across text genre, students' pauses were significantly higher in the argumentative essay than that of the descriptive essay. Multiple regression revealed negative correlation between much pauses and poor quality of students' product in the descriptive essay while there was no correlation found in the argumentative essay.

Layout logical labelling and finding the semantic relationships between citing and cited paper content

Currently, large data sets of in-text citations and citation contexts are becoming available for research and developing tools. Using the model method to analyse these data, one can characterise thematic relationships between citation contexts from citing and the cited paper content. However, to build relevant topic models and to compare them accurately for papers linked by citation relationships we have to know the semantic labels of PDF papers' layout such as section titles, paragraph boundaries, etc. Recent achievements in papers' conversion from a PDF form into a rich attributed JSON format allow us to develop new approaches for the logical labelling of the papers' layout. This paper presents a re-usable method and open source software for the logical labelling of PDF papers, which gave good quality of a layout element's recognition for a set of research papers. Using these semantic labels we made a precise comparison of topic models built for citing and cited papers and we found some level of similarity between them.

Paragraph Boundaries: Examining Identification and Production Performance of Iranian EFL Learners

This study investigates the effect of Iranian EFL students' proficiency level on their ability in identifying paragraph boundaries of unparagraphed expository texts and in producing paragraph boundaries in their own L2 expository writings. Further, this study seeks the correlation between advanced and intermediate learners' ability to identify and produce paragraph boundaries. On the basis of their scores on the general proficiency test of Michigan, intermediate and advanced EFL students studying in the English department of University of Isfahan participated in receptive and productive tasks. The results of data analysis indicate that proficiency is connected with paragraph perception, a fact more observable in productive performance; at advanced levels, students seem to be more skillful in the appropriate boundary placement. Moreover, identification performance has a positive medium correlation with production in the case of both advanced and intermediate groups of EFL learners.

Intonation and the structural organisation of texts in simultaneous interpreting

This paper investigates the way intonation can contribute to the organisation of source texts (ST) and target texts (TT) in simultaneous interpreting (SI). The research method and results offer a broader perspective on the use of intonation in SI, a parameter often viewed in the literature as anomalous and genre-specific. The empirical analysis focuses on the structural organisation of ST and TT into phonological paragraphs, a process which is achieved, in part, through intonational choices both of the speakers and of the interpreters. A corpus-based study of fifteen ST and the corresponding TT produced in the European Parliament and European Commission was conducted using an acoustic methodology with discoursal support. The results indicate that both speakers and interpreters comply with the intonational pattern described in the literature, i.e. high pitch at initial paragraph boundaries and low pitch at final boundaries. These findings should be relevant for future research on intonation in the field of interpreting, intonation being a factor that seems to affect both the interpreter’s perception of the ST and, ultimately, the listeners’ reception of the TT.

Invisible Time Lines in the Fabric of Events: Temporal Coherence in Yucatec Narratives

This article examines how narratives are structured in a language in which event order is largely not coded. Yucatec Maya lacks both tense inflections and temporal connectives corresponding to English after and before. It is shown that the coding of events in Yucatec narratives is subject to a strict iconicity constraint within paragraph boundaries. Aspectual viewpoint shifting is used to reconcile iconicity preservation with the requirements of a more flexible narrative structure.

Summarization of Imaged Documents without OCR

A system is presented for creating a summary indicating the contents of an imaged document. The summary is composed from selected regions extracted from the imaged document. The regions may include sentences, key phrases, headings, and figures. The extracts are identified without the use of optical character recognition. The imaged document is first processed to identify the word-bounding boxes, the reading order of words, and the location of sentence and paragraph boundaries in the text. The word-bounding boxes are grouped into equivalence classes to mimic the terms in a text document. Equivalence classes representing content words are identified, and key phrases are identified from the set of content words. Summary sentences are selected using a statistically based classifier applied to a set of discrete sentence features. Evaluation of sentence selection against a set of abstracts created by a professional abstracting company is given.

Variability and Consistency in Speech Breathing During Reading

Lung volumes during reading and associated factors such as speech intensity and linguistic influences were studied in six healthy young women over 7 to 10 sessions, using respiratory inductive plethysmography. Intrasubject variability of lung volumes over the sessions was almost as great as the intersubject variability. Some of the intrasubject variability was associated with natural variations of speech intensity within a "comfortable loudness" range. The lung volume variability during reading is contrasted with high degrees of both inter- and intrasubject consistency in the location of inspirations, which occurred almost exclusively at grammatically appropriate places in the texts (paragraph, sentence, clause, and phrase boundaries). Within each reading passage, lung volumes were significantly increased for (a) louder utterances, (b) inspirations at sentence and paragraph boundaries compared to inspirations at other locations within sentences, (c) longer utterances compared to shorter utterances, and (d) initial breaths compared to final breaths. The implications of these findings for the neural control of breathing during speech are considered.

What do paragraph markings do?

This report investigates the role of paragraph markings in text: how informative a paragraph cue is and how paragraph cues affect interpretation. In the first study, subjects were shown unparagraphed versions of three texts and asked to reinstate the paragraph markings. The second study examined the effect of paragraph marking on reading time, ratings, and judgment of important ideas in the text. The results show that a paragraph is a discourse unit that is suggested but not absolutely specified by the content of the text. The position and presence of paragraph boundaries did not affect the reading speed or ratings of the texts, but they did affect what ideas were considered to be important.

The role of intonation as a cue to topic management in conversation

Only recently have researchers begun to examine how intonation is used to signal topic structure in conversation, and most of the emphasis has been on F 0 characteristics in production, rather than perception. The present study was designed to test whether certain F 0 cues found to signal paragraph boundaries could also signal topic boundaries in conversation. Eight listening tests were constructed using excerpts isolated from one face-to-face (FF) and one non-face-to-face (NFF) conversation. Half of the tests were also filtered so as to make them unintelligible, but with F 0 patterns preserved. Subjects then made decisions about preceding or following topics for each isolated test utterance, based solely on the information present in the utterance. The results show that syntactic and semantic information provides much stronger topic cues in both FF and NFF conversations than does intonation; rising F 0 (as a question marker) is the strongest intonation cue, signaling topic continuation. Overall, the results suggest that the total context in which utterances are placed and the inherent optionality of conversational interaction may be the major factors contributing to the way topics are managed in natural conversation.

Perception of sentence and paragraph boundaries in natural conversation

Subjects were presented with two versions (with and without semantic information) of a natural conversation and in each condition were asked to respond when they heard a sentence or paragraph boundary. Presence of semantic information resulted in increased numbers of both very quick and very slow responses. Sentence boundaries are cued by non-level intonation contours, laryngealization, pre-boundary lengthening, and presence of a pause, all unit-terminal phenomena; cues for paragraph boundaries both precede and follow a change in topic, reflecting the optional nature of topic changes in natural conversations.

Some temporal aspects of spoken discourse

A sixteen‐minute “prompted monologue” was produced spontaneously by a male native speaker of English. The last five minutes, during which the speaker spoke without interruption by the prompter, were used for a listening test. Twenty‐five subjects heard a filtered version and an undistorted version of the material, and indicated their perception of sentence and paragraph boundaries by pressing a telegraph key. The percent pre‐boundary lengthening was calculated for perceived sentence and paragraph boundaries within the uninterrupted “turn” as well as for the boundaries of “turns”. The average pre‐boundary lengthening for sentence boundaries and paragraph boundaries within the uninterrupted five‐minute “turn” was 34.0% and 34.4% respectively, while the pre‐boundary lengthening before the end of a “turn” averaged 42.9%. Pauses between sentences averaged 737 ms, those between paragraphs, 1659 ms, and those between “turns”, 5045 ms. While the difference between paragraph terminations and “turn” terminations could be explained on the basis of pause duration as well as difference in degree of lengthening, other factors enter the picture as far as the distinction between sentence and paragraph boundaries within a “turn” is concerned.

Temporal organization and prosody—perceptual aspects

The paper presents a review of recent research dealing with the perceptual aspects of temporal organization of spoken language and its prosodic structure. Special emphasis will be placed on the prosodic characteristics of discourse: units of spoken language that consist of more than one sentence. Results of a recent experiment will be reported, in which listeners were presented with filtered and unfiltered versions of a naturally produced narrative monologue, and were requested to identify sentence and paragraph and boundaries. The performance of the listeners in identifying boundaries will be correlated with the prosodic cues available to them in the filtered version, and the additional syntactic and semantic cues present in the unfiltered version. Analysis of listener responses makes it possible to separate the perceptual role of prosodic cues from that of syntactic and semantic cues. The distinction between the acoustic manifestation of sentence boundaries and paragraph boundaries will be likewise discussed.