Anaphora and Discourse Structure

We argue in this paper that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within discourse structure, instead work anaphorically to contribute relational meaning, with only indirect dependence on discourse structure. This allows a simpler discourse structure to provide scaffolding for compositional semantics, and reveals multiple ways in which the relational meaning conveyed by adverbial connectives can interact with that associated with discourse structure. We conclude by sketching out a lexicalised grammar for discourse that facilitates discourse interpretation as a product of compositional rules, anaphor resolution and inference.Comment: 45 pages, 17 figures. Revised resubmission to Computational Linguistic

PERFORMING ANAPHORA IN MODERN GREEK: A NEO-GRICEAN PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS

The paper addresses the problem of interpreting anaphoric NPs in Modern Greek. It includes a proposal of a novel analysis based on the systematic interaction of the neo- Gricean pragmatic principles of communication, which provides a neat and elegant approach to NP-anaphora resolution. The findings of this study provide evidence for an account of NP-anaphora in terms of the division of labour between syntax and pragmatics and more accurately in terms of the systematic interaction of the neo-Gricean pragmatic principles

Relations subordonnantes et coordonnantes pour la désambiguïsation du discours.

Une représentation hiérarchique du discours permet, entre autres, de mettre au jour des contraintes liées à l'accessibilité des référents ainsi qu'au rattachement d'un nouveau constituant. L'objectif de la présente étude est de mettre en lumière un nouvel avantage d'une représentation hiérarchique du discours. Nous démontrons que la distinction relations subordonnantes vs. relations coordonnantes permet de réduire l'ambiguïté de discours avec deux connecteurs

The annotation scheme of the Turkish Discourse Bank and an evaluation of inconsistent annotations

In this paper, we report on the annotation procedures we developed for annotating the Turkish Discourse Bank (TDB), an effort that extends the Penn Discourse Tree Bank (PDTB) annotation style by using it for annotating Turkish discourse. After a brief introduction to the TDB, we describe the annotation cycle and the annotation scheme we developed, defining which parts of the scheme are an extension of the PDTB and which parts are different. We provide inter-coder reliability calculations on the first and second arguments of some connectives and discuss the most important sources of disagreement among annotators

Turkish Discourse Bank: Porting a discourse annotation style to a morphologically rich language

This paper briefly describes the Turkish Discourse Bank, the first publicly available annotated discourse resource for Turkish. It focuses on the challenges posed by annotating Turkish, a free word order language with rich inflectional and derivational morphology. It shows the usefulness of the PDTB style annotation but points out the need to expand this annotation style with the needs of the target language

The Rhetorical Structure of Modus Tollens: An Exploration in Logic-Mining

A general method for mining discourse for occurrences of the rules of inference would be useful in a variety of natural language processing applications. The method described here has its roots in Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). An RST analysis of a rule of inference can be used as an exemplar to produce a relational complex in the form of a nested relational proposition. This relational complex can be transformed into a logical expression using the logic of relational propositions. The expression can then be generalized as a logical signature for use in logic-mining discourse for instances of the rule. Generalized logical signatures reached in this manner appear to be grounded in identifiable logical relationships with their respective rules of inference. Thus, from a text, it is possible to identify a rhetorical structure, and from the structure, a relational proposition, and from the relational proposition, a generalized logical signature, and from the signature, the rule of inference residing within the text. The focus in this paper is on modus tollens and its variants, but the method is extensible to other rules as well