To ensure readability, text is often written and presented with due formatting. These text formatting devices help the writer to effectively convey the narrative. At the same time, these help the readers pick up the structure of the discourse and comprehend the conveyed information. There have been a number of linguistic theories on discourse structure of text. However, these theories only consider unformatted text. Multimedia text contains rich formatting features which can be leveraged for various NLP tasks. In this paper, we study some of these discourse features in multimedia text and what communicative function they fulfill in the context. As a case study, we use these features to harvest structured subject knowledge of geometry from textbooks. We conclude that the discourse and text layout features provide information that is complementary to lexical semantic information. Finally, we show that the harvested structured knowledge can be used to improve an existing solver for geometry problems, making it more accurate as well as more explainable.

中文翻译：

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多媒体话语：从教科书中提取几何知识的案例研究

为确保可读性，文本通常以适当的格式书写和呈现。这些文本格式化设备帮助作者有效地传达叙事。同时，这些有助于读者掌握话语的结构，理解所传达的信息。关于语篇结构的语言学理论有很多。然而，这些理论只考虑无格式文本。多媒体文本包含丰富的格式化功能，可用于各种 NLP 任务。在本文中，我们研究了多媒体文本中的一些话语特征，以及它们在语境中的交际功能。作为案例研究，我们使用这些特征从教科书中获取几何的结构化学科知识。我们得出结论，话语和文本布局特征提供了与词汇语义信息互补的信息。最后，我们展示了收获的结构化知识可用于改进现有的几何问题求解器，使其更准确且更易于解释。