Subject-tracking and topic continuity in the Church Slavonic translation of the story of Abraham and his niece Mary

The present article addresses issues of referentiality and text cohesion in a Church Slavonic narrative text. Starting with the specific problem of referential conflict as formulated by Kibrik (19871, issues of tracking personal participants in a narrative text are broadly explored in order to arrive at a rationale for the construction of cohesive text interpretation through topic continuity in subject position. The article takes an interpretative text-based approach of close-reading and argues for participant tracking to be dependent on text genre and general cultural prerequisites of text reading and interpretation rather than on systemic grammatical features of language. It is also hinted at the possibility that medieval narrative text genres (like the Byzantine-Slavic hagiographic genre being explored in this paper through the specimen of the Story of Abraham and Mary) may adhere to a type of narrative construction which places more responsibility on the reader-listener than on the narrator

Centering, Anaphora Resolution, and Discourse Structure

Centering was formulated as a model of the relationship between attentional state, the form of referring expressions, and the coherence of an utterance within a discourse segment (Grosz, Joshi and Weinstein, 1986; Grosz, Joshi and Weinstein, 1995). In this chapter, I argue that the restriction of centering to operating within a discourse segment should be abandoned in order to integrate centering with a model of global discourse structure. The within-segment restriction causes three problems. The first problem is that centers are often continued over discourse segment boundaries with pronominal referring expressions whose form is identical to those that occur within a discourse segment. The second problem is that recent work has shown that listeners perceive segment boundaries at various levels of granularity. If centering models a universal processing phenomenon, it is implausible that each listener is using a different centering algorithm.The third issue is that even for utterances within a discourse segment, there are strong contrasts between utterances whose adjacent utterance within a segment is hierarchically recent and those whose adjacent utterance within a segment is linearly recent. This chapter argues that these problems can be eliminated by replacing Grosz and Sidner's stack model of attentional state with an alternate model, the cache model. I show how the cache model is easily integrated with the centering algorithm, and provide several types of data from naturally occurring discourses that support the proposed integrated model. Future work should provide additional support for these claims with an examination of a larger corpus of naturally occurring discourses.Comment: 35 pages, uses elsart12, lingmacros, named, psfi

Utilizing Features of Verbs in Statistical Zero Pronoun Resolution for Japanese Speech

PACLIC 23 / City University of Hong Kong / 3-5 December 200

Designing the Business Conversation Corpus

While the progress of machine translation of written text has come far in the past several years thanks to the increasing availability of parallel corpora and corpora-based training technologies, automatic translation of spoken text and dialogues remains challenging even for modern systems. In this paper, we aim to boost the machine translation quality of conversational texts by introducing a newly constructed Japanese-English business conversation parallel corpus. A detailed analysis of the corpus is provided along with challenging examples for automatic translation. We also experiment with adding the corpus in a machine translation training scenario and show how the resulting system benefits from its use

Tagging Prosody and Discourse Structure in Elicited Spontaneous Speech

This paper motivates and describes the annotation and analysis of prosody and discourse structure for several large spoken language corpora. The annotation schema are of two types: tags for prosody and intonation, and tags for several aspects of discourse structure. The choice of the particular tagging schema in each domain is based in large part on the insights they provide in corpus-based studies of the relationship between discourse structure and the accenting of referring expressions in American English. We first describe these results and show that the same models account for the accenting of pronouns in an extended passage from one of the Speech Warehouse hotel-booking dialogues. We then turn to corpora described in Venditti [Ven00], which adapts the same models to Tokyo Japanese. Japanese is interesting to compare to English, because accent is lexically specified and so cannot mark discourse focus in the same way. Analyses of these corpora show that local pitch range expansion serves the analogous focusing function in Japanese. The paper concludes with a section describing several outstanding questions in the annotation of Japanese intonation which corpus studies can help to resolve.Work reported in this paper was supported in part by a grant from the Ohio State University Office of Research, to Mary E. Beckman and co-principal investigators on the OSU Speech Warehouse project, and by an Ohio State University Presidential Fellowship to Jennifer J. Venditti

Установление субъекта и непрерывность темы в церковнославянском переводе Слова об Аврамии и его племяннице Марии

The present article addresses issues of referentiality and text cohesion in a Church Slavonic narrative text. Starting with the specific problem of referential conflict as formulated by Kibrik [1987], issues of tracking personal participants in a narrative text are broadly explored in order to arrive at a rationale for the construction of cohesive text interpretation through topic continuity in subject position. The article takes an interpretative text-based approach of close-reading and argues for participant tracking to be dependent on text genre and general cultural prerequisites of text reading and interpretation rather than on systemic grammatical features of language. It is also hinted at the possibility that medieval narrative text genres (like the Byzantine-Slavic hagiographic genre being explored in this paper through the specimen of the Story of Abraham and Mary) may adhere to a type of narrative construction which places more responsibility on the reader-listener than on the narrator. DOI: 10.31168/2305-6754.2019.8.2.2В статье исследуются вопросы референциальности и непрерывности темы в одном церковнославянском тексте — в Слове об Аврамии и его племяннице Марии. Исходя из особой проблематики референциального конфликта, разработанной Кибриком [1987], вопросы идентификации и установления личных участников повествования трактуются более широко, благодаря чему оказывается возможным моделировать общие предпосылки интерпретативного построения непрерывности темы. На основе целостного подхода к отдельному тексту автор приходит к выводу, что установление участников повествования зависит не от системного устроения языка, но от жанровых свойств текста и общекультурных знаний слушателя-читателя. Предполагается, что средневековые повествовательные жанры (такие, в частности, как славяновизантийская агиография, анализируемая в настоящей статье) принадлежат к такому повествовательному типу, который перекладывает ответственность на расшифровку текста с повествователя на слушателя-читателя. DOI: 10.31168/2305-6754.2019.8.2.

Centering: A Framework for Modelling the Coherence of Discourse

Our original paper (Grosz, Joshi, and Weinstein, 1983) on centering claimed that certain entities mentioned in an utterance were more central than others and that this property imposed constraints on a speaker\u27s use of different types of referring expression. Centering was proposed as a model that accounted for this phenomenon. We argued that the compatibility of centering properties of an utterance with choice of referring expression affected the coherence of discourse. Subsequently, we expanded the ideas presented therein. We defined various centering constructs and proposed two centering rules in terms of these constructs. A draft manuscript describing this elaborated centering framework and presenting some initial theoretical claims has been in wide circulation since 1986. This draft (Grosz, Joshi, and Weinstein 1986, hereafter, GJW86) has led to a number of papers by others on this topic and has been extensively cited, but has never been published. We have been urged to publish the more detailed description of the centering framework and theory proposed in GJW86 so that an official version would be archivally available. The task of completing and revising this draft became more daunting as time passed and more and more papers appeared on centering. Many of these papers proposed extensions to or revisions of the theory and attempted to answer questions posed in GJW86. It has become ever more clear that it would be useful to have a definitive statement of the original motivations for centering, the basic definitions underlying the centering framework, and the original theoretical claims. This paper attempts to meet that need. To accomplish this goal, we have chosen to remove descriptions of many open research questions posed in GJW86 as well as solutions that were only partially developed. We have also greatly shortened the discussion of criteria for and constraints on a possible semantic theory as a foundation for this work