  This paper is aimed at reporting on the development and application of a
computer model for discourse analysis through segmentation. Segmentation refers
to the principled division of texts into contiguous constituents. Other studies
have looked at the application of a number of models to the analysis of
discourse by computer. The segmentation procedure developed for the present
investigation is called LSM ('Link Set Median'). It was applied to three corpus
of 300 texts from three different genres. The results obtained by application
of the LSM procedure on the corpus were then compared to segmentation carried
out at random. Statistical analyses suggested that LSM significantly
outperformed random segmentation, thus indicating that the segmentation was
meaningful.
