Text Type and the Position of a Temporal Adverbial within the Sentence

A sentence with a certain type of temporal adverbial is ambiguous, and one reading is lost when the adverbial appears in sentence-initial position. Sentence (1a), for example, has a reading in which there was some three-hear period in the past during which Mary lived in Amsterdam and a reading in which Mary has lived in Amsterdam for the three years preceding speech time: (1) a. Mary has lived in Amsterdam for three years. b. For three years Mary has lived in Amsterdam. Sentence (1b) has only the reading in which Mary lives in Amsterdam at speech time and has done so for the preceding three years. The reading that remains when the adverbial is in sentence-initial position is more specific about the time at which the event occurs, and therefore one would expect to see more initial-position adverbials in a narrative text, where the order of events is important. In testing this hypothesis on the ECI corpus, it was found that it is not the narrative/non-narrative distinction that results in a significant difference in initial-position adverbial usage; Instead, narratives with a large amount of flashback material have significantly more initial position adverbials, indicating that in order to accurately predict adverbial position a subclassification of the category "narrative" based on the amount of flashback material is needed

Algorithms for Analysing the Temporal Structure of Discourse

We describe a method for analysing the temporal structure of a discourse which takes into account the effects of tense, aspect, temporal adverbials and rhetorical structure and which minimises unnecessary ambiguity in the temporal structure. It is part of a discourse grammar implemented in Carpenter's ALE formalism. The method for building up the temporal structure of the discourse combines constraints and preferences: we use constraints to reduce the number of possible structures, exploiting the HPSG type hierarchy and unification for this purpose; and we apply preferences to choose between the remaining options using a temporal centering mechanism. We end by recommending that an underspecified representation of the structure using these techniques be used to avoid generating the temporal/rhetorical structure until higher-level information can be used to disambiguate.Comment: EACL '95, 8 pages, 1 eps picture, tar-ed, compressed, uuencoded, uses eaclap.sty, a4wide.sty, epsf.te

Aspect and Adverbials

No abstract

Long Distance Pronominalisation and Global Focus

Our corpus of descriptive text contains a significant number of long-distance pronominal references(8.4% of the total). In order to account for howthese pronouns are interpreted, we re-examine Grosz and Sidner’s theory of the attentional state, and in particular the use of the global focus to supplement centering theory. Our corpus evidence concerning these long-distance pronominal references, as well as studies of the use of descriptions, proper names and ambiguous uses of pronouns, lead us to conclude that a discourse focus stack mechanism of the type proposed by Sidner is essential to account for the use of these referring expressions. We suggest revising the Grosz & Sidner framework by allowing for the possibility that an entity in a focus space may have special status

Integrating Referring and Informing in NP Planning

Two of the functions of an NP are to refer (identify a particular entity) and to inform (provide new information about an entity). While many NPs may serve only one of these functions, some NPs conflate the functions, not only referring but also providing new information about the referent. For instance, this delicious apple indicates not only which apple the speaker is referring to, but also provides information as to the speaker's appreciation of the apple. This paper describes an implemented NPplanning system which integrates informing into the referring expression generation process. The integration involves allowing informing to influence decisions at each stage of the formation of the referring form, including: the selection of the form of the NP; the choice of the head of a common NP; the choice of the Deictic in common NPs; the choice of restrictive modifiers, and the inclusion of non-referring modifiers. The system is domain-independent, and is presently functioning within a full text generation system

On the Use of Automatically Generated Discourse-Level Information in a Concept-to-Speech Synthesis System

This paper describes the latest version of the SOLE concept-to-speech system, which uses linguistic information provided by a natural language generation system to improve the prosody of synthetic speech. We discuss the types of linguistic information that prove most useful and the implications for text-to-speech systems

Text Type and the Position of a Temporal Adverbial within the Sentence

: In this document, I argue that a sentence with a certain type of temporal adverbial is ambiguous, and that one reading is lost when the adverbial appears in sentenceinitial position. Sentence (1a), for example, has a reading in which there was some three-year period in the past during which Mary lived in Amsterdam and a reading in which Mary has lived in Amsterdam for the three years preceding speech time: (1) a. Mary has lived in Amsterdam for three years. b. For three years Mary has lived in Amsterdam. Sentence (1b) has only the reading in which Mary lives in Amsterdam at speech time and has done so for the preceding three years. The reading that remains when the adverbial is in sentence-initial position is more specific about the time at which the event occurs, and therefore one would expect to see more initial-position adverbials in a narrative text, where the order of events is important. In testing this hypothesis on the ECI corpus, it was found that it is not the narrative/no..

A Constraint-Based Grammar of English Temporal Connectives

: This document describes a set of feature structure representations for English temporal connectives. Their lexical entries are described and motivated in detail, along with a type hierarchy that will be used in the computational HPSG/DRT system we are building to parse texts containing these temporal connectives. This work is based on the TTT proposal for Dutch temporal connectives described in [ Oversteegen, 1989, Oversteegen, 1993 ] and on Martin's [ 1992 ] system representing the ideational (external) meaning of temporal relations in English. EP6665: DANDELION For internal use only Deliverable R2.3.3 Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Martin's system of temporal connectives 2 3 How the information from the text is used 4 3.1 Modifying Martin's system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 4 Incorporating Oversteegen's approach 7 5 A representation of the English temporal connectives 13 5.1 When . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...