"Your Doctor Won’t Tell You This ...": Expert and Lay Perspectives in Health Communication Discourse

Author(s):  
Jennie A. Abrahamson ◽  
Victoria L. Rubin

We investigate health care provider and lay consumer perspectives in online health communication, information sharing, and use to improve communication that supports healthy everyday life behavior. With Rhetorical Structure Theory analysis, we differentiate discourse structure patterns and communicative goals in provider and consumer answers regarding a chronic condition - diabetes.Nous investiguons les perspectives des professionnels et des usagers du système de soins de santé en matière de communications en ligne, d’échange et d’utilisation d’information médicale pour améliorer les comportements quotidiens sains. À l’aide d’une analyse des réponses basée sur la théorie de la structure rhétorique, nous discriminons les modèles de structure de discours et les objectifs communicationnels des fournisseurs et des usagers concernant une maladie chronique : le diabète. 

2015 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-223
Author(s):  
Christine Urquhart ◽  
Alexander H. Urquhart

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to criticise the paper by Jennie A. Abrahamson and Victoria L. Rubin (2012) “Discourse structure differences in lay and professional health communication”, Journal of Documentation, Vol. 68 No. 6, pp. 826-851. Design/methodology/approach – The author reviewed the antecedents of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) in discourse analysis, and paid close attention to the differences between the original formulation of RST, later formulations of the RST model and the application of RST in this paper. The author also reviewed the literature on physician-patient communication, and patient-patient support to contextualise the findings of Abrahamson and Rubin. Findings – The paper shows evidence of over-simplification of RST since its initial formulation. Next, the Motivation relationship in the original Mann/Thompson formulation of RST appears problematic. This makes the authors’ RST findings that patient-patient (or consumer-consumer) information sharing appear to be more effective than physician-consumer information sharing rather tenuous. An important additional flaw is that there was only one physician participant in this study. A practical limitation to the study is that physicians mostly interact face-to-face with patients and use of consumer advice web sites may not fit well with the current practice of medicine. Research limitations/implications – The author had limited examples in the paper to examine how the authors had categorised the binary unit relationships. Originality/value – RST is promising for discourse analysis of information advice web sites but simplifications in its application can lead to unwarranted claims.


2015 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-232
Author(s):  
Jennie A. Abrahamson ◽  
Victoria L. Rubin

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to respond to Urquhart and Urquhart’s critique of the previous work entitled “Discourse structure differences in lay and professional health communication”, published in this journal in 2012 (Vol. 68 No. 6, pp. 826-851, doi: 10.1108/00220411211277064). Design/methodology/approach – The authors examine Urquhart and Urquhart’s critique and provide responses to their concerns and cautionary remarks against cross-disciplinary contributions. The authors reiterate the central claim. Findings – The authors argue that Mann and Thompson’s (1987, 1988) Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) offers valuable insights into computer-mediated health communication and deserves further discussion of its methodological strength and weaknesses for application in library and information science. Research limitations/implications – While the authors agree that some methodological limitations pointed out by Urquhart and Urquhart are valid, the authors take this opportunity to correct certain misunderstandings and misstatements. Originality/value – The authors argue for continued use of innovative techniques borrowed from neighbouring disciplines, in spite of objections from the researchers accustomed to a familiar strand of literature. The authors encourage researchers to consider RST and other computational linguistics-based discourse analysis annotation frameworks that could provide the basis for integrated research, and eventual applications in information behaviour and information retrieval.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kun Sun ◽  
Rong Wang ◽  
Wenxin Xiong

Abstract The notion of genre has been widely explored using quantitative methods from both lexical and syntactical perspectives. However, discourse structure has rarely been used to examine genre. Mostly concerned with the interrelation of discourse units, discourse structure can play a crucial role in genre analysis. Nevertheless, few quantitative studies have explored genre distinctions from a discourse structure perspective. Here, we use two English discourse corpora (RST-DT and GUM) to investigate discourse structure from a novel viewpoint. The RST-DT is divided into four small subcorpora distinguished according to genre, and another corpus (GUM) containing seven genres are used for cross-verification. An RST (rhetorical structure theory) tree is converted into dependency representations by taking information from RST annotations to calculate the discourse distance through a process similar to that used to calculate syntactic dependency distance. Moreover, the data on dependency representations deriving from the two corpora are readily convertible into network data. Afterwards, we examine different genres in the two corpora by combining discourse distance and discourse network. The two methods are mutually complementary in comprehensively revealing the distinctiveness of various genres. Accordingly, we propose an effective quantitative method for assessing genre differences using discourse distance and discourse network. This quantitative study can help us better understand the nature of genre.


2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 683-722 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shafiq Joty ◽  
Francisco Guzmán ◽  
Lluís Màrquez ◽  
Preslav Nakov

In this article, we explore the potential of using sentence-level discourse structure for machine translation evaluation. We first design discourse-aware similarity measures, which use all-subtree kernels to compare discourse parse trees in accordance with the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Then, we show that a simple linear combination with these measures can help improve various existing machine translation evaluation metrics regarding correlation with human judgments both at the segment level and at the system level. This suggests that discourse information is complementary to the information used by many of the existing evaluation metrics, and thus it could be taken into account when developing richer evaluation metrics, such as the WMT-14 winning combined metric DiscoTK party. We also provide a detailed analysis of the relevance of various discourse elements and relations from the RST parse trees for machine translation evaluation. In particular, we show that (i) all aspects of the RST tree are relevant, (ii) nuclearity is more useful than relation type, and (iii) the similarity of the translation RST tree to the reference RST tree is positively correlated with translation quality.


2011 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 120-132
Author(s):  
R Pineault ◽  
S Provost ◽  
M Hamel ◽  
A Couture ◽  
JF Levesque

Objectifs Déterminer dans quelle mesure l’expérience de soins varie selon les maladies chroniques et analyser la relation entre les modèles d’organisation de soins de santé primaires (SSP) et l’expérience de soins rapportée par des patients atteints de différentes maladies chroniques. Méthodologie Nous avons jumelé les résultats d’une enquête populationnelle et d’une enquête organisationnelle menées dans deux régions du Québec. Nous avons ciblé cinq groupes de maladies chroniques et les avons comparés à un groupe sans maladie chronique. Résultats L’accessibilité des soins est faible pour tous les groupes de maladies chroniques et présente peu de variation selon les maladies. Les modèles de contact et de coordination intégré sont les plus accessibles, tandis que le modèle à prestataire unique est le moins accessible. Les indices du processus et des résultats de soins sont beaucoup plus élevés que l’indice de l’accessibilité, et ce, pour tous les groupes. De plus, ils varient selon les maladies, les plus élevés se trouvant dans le groupe des facteurs de risque cardiovasculaires, et les plus faibles, dans le groupe des maladies respiratoires (patients âgés de 44 ans et moins). Toutefois, lorsqu’on passe du groupe des facteurs de risque aux groupes de maladies chroniques plus graves, on observe que le modèle de coordination intégré et le modèle communautaire affichent en général une meilleure performance quant au processus de soins, ce qui met en lumière le plus grand potentiel de ces deux modèles pour répondre aux besoins des personnes atteintes des maladies chroniques les plus graves dans le système de soins de santé canadien.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 690-712 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kun Sun ◽  
Wenxin Xiong

In past studies, the few quantitative approaches to discourse structure were mostly confined to the presentation of the frequency of discourse relations. However, quantitative approaches should take into account both hierarchical and relational layers in the discourse structure. This study considers these factors and addresses the issue of how discourse relations and discourse units are related. It draws upon the available corpora of discourse structure (rhetorical structure theory-discourse treebank (RST-DT)) from a new perspective. Since an RST tree can be converted into a syntactic dependency tree, the data extracted from the RST-DT can be useful for calculating the discourse distance in much the same way as syntactic dependency distance is calculated. Discourse distance is also applicable to measuring the depth of the human processing of discourse. Furthermore, the data derived from the RST-DT are also easily converted into network data. This study finds that discourse structure has its discourse distance minimum and each type of RST relations has its range of discourse distance. The frequency distribution of discourse data basically follows the power law on several levels, while a network approach reveals how discourse units are arranged spatially in regular patterns. The two methods are mutually complementary in revealing the interaction between discourse relations and discourse units in a comprehensive manner, as well as in revealing how people process and comprehend discourse dynamically. Accordingly, we propose merging the two methods so as to yield a computational model for assessing discourse complexity and comprehension.


Author(s):  
Subalalitha C. N.

This chapter discusses how text summaries could be generated by using a high-level semantic representation. The semantic representation is built using the discourse structure which is comprised of three text representation techniques, namely, universal networking language (UNL), rhetorical structure theory (RST), and Saṅgatis. Sangati is an ancient concept that is used in Sanskrit language literature to capture coherence. This discourse structure is indexed using a concept called sūtra which has been used in both Tamil language and Sanskrit literatures. The chapter mainly focusses on how summary could be generated by using this unique discourse structure and the indexing technique concept, sūtra. Forum for information retreival (FIRE) corpus has been used to test the system and a performance comparison has been done with the one of the state-of-art summary generation systems that is built on discourse structure.


Author(s):  
О.С. Филичева

Постановка задачи. В статье рассматриваются механизмы порождения и понимания текста с опорой на положения теории риторической структуры (ТРС), разработанной У. Манном и С. Томпсон. Данная теория основана на идее структурно-функционального направления в лингвистике о том, что связь между формой и содержанием языковой единицы объясняется структурой зависимостей. Зависимость одной единицы языка от другой в новообразованном единстве трактуется как функция, которую выполняет языковая единица в речи, или дискурсе. ТРС представлена как модель анализа семантических отношений между ядерными (главными) и сателлитовыми (зависимыми) дискурсивными единицами, образующими когерентный текст. Результаты. Описаны разные подходы к определению дискурса и его структурных компонентов. Проанализирована ядерно-сателлитовая модель структуры дискурсивных единиц, предложенная У. Манном и С. Томпсон. Авторы ТРС подчеркивают, что в основе когерентности текста лежат риторические отношения, которые связывают единицы дискурса и способствуют адекватному кодированию и декодированию информации. Это объясняется тем, что ядерно-сателлитовая организация дискурсивных единиц распределяет фон и фокус смыслового восприятия текста адресатом. Выявлены правила графической репрезентации риторических отношений, а также принципы классификации асимметричных и симметричных, моноядерных и многоядерных риторических отношений. Выводы. Ядерность и иерархичность признаются ведущими принципами структурной организации дискурса в ТРС. Иерархичность прослеживается не только в смысловой и интенциональной выделенности ядра по отношению к сателлиту, но и в построении риторических отношений между дискурсивными единицами. Таким образом, ядерно-сателлитовая модель дискурса является эффективным функциональным способом производства и интерпретации текстов, применяемым для решения различных коммуникативных задач. Statement of the problem. The article gives an explanation of the text generation and interpretation according to the Rhetorical structure theory (RST), developed by W. Mann and S. Thompson. This theory is based on structural and functional approaches in linguistics, which present the relations between the form and the content of a language unit as the structure of dependencies. The dependency of one language unit on another in the newly formed unity is understood as a function performed by the language unit in speech or discourse. RST provides as a model for analyzing semantic relations between nucleus (main) and satellite (dependent) discursive units that form the coherence of the text. Results. Different approaches to defining discourse and its structural components are described. The nucleus-satellite model of the discourse structure proposed by W. Mann and S. Thompson is analyzed. The authors of RST emphasize that the coherence of the text is based on rhetorical relations that connect the units of discourse and contribute to the adequate coding and decoding of information. The nucleus-satellite organization of discursive units distributes the addressee`s focus of text perception. The principles of graphic representation of rhetorical relations are revealed, as well as the principles of classification of asymmetrical and symmetrical, mononucleus and multinucleus rhetorical relations. Conclusion. Nuclearity and hierarchy are recognized as the leading ways of discourse structural organization in RST. Hierarchy can be traced not only in the semantic and intentional allocation of the nucleus, but also in the structural organization of rhetorical relations among discursive units. Thus, a nucleus-satellite model of discourse serves as an effective functional principle to generate and interpret texts, which used to solve various communication tasks.


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