In this article, we first present the platform and the Dislog language, designed for discourse analysis with a logic and linguistic perspective. The platform has now reached a certain level of maturity which allows the recognition of a large diversity of discourse structures including general-purpose rhetorical structures as well as domain-specific discourse structures. The Dislog language is based on linguistic considerations and includes knowledge access and inference capabilities. Functionalities of the language are presented together with a method for writing discourse (...) analysis rules. Efficiency and portability of the system over domains and languages are investigated to conclude this first part. In a second part, we analyse the different types of arguments found in several document genres, most notably: procedures, didactic texts and requirements. Arguments form a large class of discourse relations. A generic and frequently encountered form emerges from our analysis: ?reasons for conclusion? which constitutes a homogeneous family of arguments from a language, functional and conceptual point of view. This family can be viewed as a kind of proto-argument. We then elaborate its linguistic structure and show how it is implemented in . We then investigate the cooperation between explanation and arguments, in particular in didactic texts where they are particularly rich and elaborated. This article ends with a prospective section that develops current and potential uses of this work and how it can be extended to the recognition of other forms of arguments. (shrink)

Lexical semantics has become a major research area within computational linguistics, drawing from psycholinguistics, knowledge representation, computer algorithms and architecture. Research programmes whose goal is the definition of large lexicons are asking what the appropriate representation structure is for different facets of lexical information. Among these facets, semantic information is probably the most complex and the least explored.Computational Lexical Semantics is one of the first volumes to provide models for the creation of various kinds of computerised lexicons for the automatic (...) treatment of natural language, with applications to machine translation, automatic indexing, and database front-ends, knowledge extraction, among other things. It focuses on semantic issues, as seen by linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists. Besides describing academic research, it also covers ongoing industrial projects. (shrink)