31 research outputs found
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
Recommended from our members
A Reichenbachian Account of the Interaction of the Present Perfect with Temporal Adverbials
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
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 Sidnerâs 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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...