Discourse Structure¶
The organization and hierarchical relationships between discourse units (sentences, clauses, propositions) within a document. Discourse structure analysis examines how these units are connected through semantic dependencies and rhetorical relations.
In the context of misinformation detection, discourse-level structure has been hypothesized to distinguish fake from real news. Real news documents often exhibit coherent, well-organized discourse structures reflecting careful editorial writing, while fabricated content may show fragmented or disjointed sentence relationships due to the difficulty of maintaining coherence under deceptive intent.
Key papers¶
- Learning Hierarchical Discourse-level Structure for Fake News Detection — proposes automatic learning of discourse dependency trees using inter-sentential attention; shows real news maintain better coherence
Related topics¶
- Rhetorical Structure Theory (foundational framework)
- Document Structure Learning (automatic structure extraction)
- Linguistic style detection (broader linguistic approaches)