English Text (Martin 1992a) consolidates this work, recontextualising cohesion as discourse semantic systems and structures as outlined below; for seminal papers see Martin (2010a, 2010b).
Specifically, understanding about narrative structure of written texts pertains to children's mastery of structural coherence (event structure) and linguistic cohesion (the use of cohesive devices to show the semantic and logical relations between clauses and sentences) of story organization.
In these studies, children with reading comprehension difficulties often demonstrated deficits in two important elements of narrative production, namely the structural coherence (event structure) and the linguistic cohesion (the use of cohesive devices to show the semantic and logical relations between clauses and sentences) of story organization.
As mentioned previously, integrating semantic relations in the measure of the lexical cohesion serves a double objective.
So a central concern for me was reinterpreting cohesive ties as discourse semantic structures and the systems behind them as discourse semantic systems – a project precipitated by Hasan's work on componential and organic cohesion, cohesive harmony and text structure (e.g. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 of Halliday & Hasan 1980).
Functional relationships between genes were derived by Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) of Medline abstracts and used to calculate the function cohesion of gene sets.
In some cases, lexical cohesion relies on an assumption that "a shared lexico-semantic relationship holds" (ibid.:591).
The above series of experiments demonstrate that modifying the lexical cohesion measure to take into account confidence measures or to include semantic relations increases the robustness of topic segmentation to transcription errors as well as to genre and domain differences.
As argued previously, confidence measures and semantic relations can be used as additional information to improve the generalized probability measure of lexical cohesion so as to be robust to transcription errors and to the absence of repetitions.
Previously, we developed a method and web-tool called Gene-set Cohesion Analysis Tool (GCAT) which determines the functional cohesion of gene sets using latent semantic analysis of Medline abstracts [ 40].
