Rhetorical figures, arguments, computation

Harris, Randy Allen; Marco, Chrysanne Di

doi:10.3233/aac-170030

Cited by 18 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…By the heuristic of my research group, "A figure is a figure is a figure" (e.g. Harris & Di Marco, 2017. That is, if a piece of language fits the structural definition of a figure (as 12 does, of Lanham's definition for epanaphora), irrespective of external considerations (in particular, intentionality), it is an instance of that figure.…”

Section: Lost My Mindmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dementia, Rhetorical Schemes, and Cognitive Resilience

Harris

2020

Poroi

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I argue for the importance of rhetorical schemes for understanding, diagnosing, and coping with forms of dementia. Schemes give salience (recruit attention), memorability (affect storage and facilitate retrieval), and aesthetic effects (induce a pleasurable emotional response) to configurations of language. They do so because of the way they play to neurocognitive pattern biases, like repetition, sequence, and position. Dementia is a condition under which language ability degrades, alongside memory and attention, but pattern biases appear to be comparatively robust, and schemic configurations become more and more frequent in dementia speech. Rhetorical schemes, that is, are notably resilient to the forces that diminish language use in individuals with dementia.

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Section: Lost My Mindmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dementia, Rhetorical Schemes, and Cognitive Resilience

Harris

2020

Poroi

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“…The rhetorical devices identified in our analyses are based on descriptions in two recent studies in Argument and Computation [8,16] and a rhetorical handbook for writers [5]. In the Waterloo Rhetorical Figure Ontology (RhetFig) [8], rhetorical figures are classified as schemes (various phonetic, lexical, and syntactic patterns), tropes (figures involving semantics such as metaphor), chroma (figures involving pragmatics such as rhetorical questions and sarcasm), and moves (discourse patterns such as counterargument-rebuttal). In the analysis of the two articles presented here we have identified figures from each category.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recognizing rhetoric in science policy arguments

Green

2020

AAC

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Diligent citizens must critically analyze arguments for science policy recommendations, such as cutting greenhouse gas emissions or growing genetically modified food crops. Science policy articles present arguments for and against such recommendations using scientific evidence and rhetorical devices. In this paper we present an in-depth analysis of argumentation and rhetorical devices in two journal articles on climate change issues. One objective was to gain a better understanding of use of rhetorical devices in this genre, as a prerequisite for designing and building a rhetorically-annotated digital corpus of full-text science policy articles. The near term objective was to inform the design of pedagogical tools to help students analyze science policy arguments.

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“…W x >). See the glossary at the end of [29] for more precise definitions, with examples. Note that these researchers use somewhat different terminology.…”

Section: Figure Detectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We have developed a much more rigorous, consistent, and principled taxonomy of figures at Waterloo. See [8,26], and [29] for clarification, explication, and argumentation about this taxonomy.…”

Section: Figure Detectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An annotation scheme for Rhetorical Figures

Harris

Marco

Ruan

et al. 2018

AAC

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Abstract. There is a driving need computationally to interrogate large bodies of text for a range of non-denotative meaning (e.g., to plot chains of reasoning, detect sentiment, diagnose genre, and so forth). But such meaning has always proven computationally allusive. It is often implicit, 'hidden' meaning, evoked by linguistic cues, stylistic arrangement, or conceptual structurefeatures that have hitherto been difficult for Natural Language Processing systems to recognize and use. Non-denotative textual effects are the historical concern of rhetorical studies, and we have turned to rhetoric in order to find new ways to advance NLP, especially for sophisticated tasks like Argument Mining. This paper highlights certain rhetorical devices that encode levels of meaning that have been overlooked in Computational Linguistics generally and Argument Mining particularly, and yet lend themselves to automated detection. These devices are the linguistic configurations known as Rhetorical Figures. We argue for the importance of these devices for Argument Mining, especially in collocations, and we present an XML annotation scheme for Rhetorical Figures to make figuration more tractable for computational approaches, particularly with an eye on the improvements they offer Argument Mining. We also discuss the intellectual and technical challenges involved in figure annotation and the implications for Machine Learning.

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Rhetorical figures, arguments, computation

Cited by 18 publications

References 19 publications

Dementia, Rhetorical Schemes, and Cognitive Resilience

Dementia, Rhetorical Schemes, and Cognitive Resilience

Recognizing rhetoric in science policy arguments

An annotation scheme for Rhetorical Figures

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