11,830 research outputs found
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
Limited Attention and Discourse Structure
This squib examines the role of limited attention in a theory of discourse
structure and proposes a model of attentional state that relates current
hierarchical theories of discourse structure to empirical evidence about human
discourse processing capabilities. First, I present examples that are not
predicted by Grosz and Sidner's stack model of attentional state. Then I
consider an alternative model of attentional state, the cache model, which
accounts for the examples, and which makes particular processing predictions.
Finally I suggest a number of ways that future research could distinguish the
predictions of the cache model and the stack model.Comment: 9 pages, uses twoside,cl,lingmacro
Neural Discourse Structure for Text Categorization
We show that discourse structure, as defined by Rhetorical Structure Theory
and provided by an existing discourse parser, benefits text categorization. Our
approach uses a recursive neural network and a newly proposed attention
mechanism to compute a representation of the text that focuses on salient
content, from the perspective of both RST and the task. Experiments consider
variants of the approach and illustrate its strengths and weaknesses.Comment: ACL 2017 camera ready versio
Discourse Structure in Machine Translation Evaluation
In this article, we explore the potential of using sentence-level discourse
structure for machine translation evaluation. We first design discourse-aware
similarity measures, which use all-subtree kernels to compare discourse parse
trees in accordance with the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Then, we show
that a simple linear combination with these measures can help improve various
existing machine translation evaluation metrics regarding correlation with
human judgments both at the segment- and at the system-level. This suggests
that discourse information is complementary to the information used by many of
the existing evaluation metrics, and thus it could be taken into account when
developing richer evaluation metrics, such as the WMT-14 winning combined
metric DiscoTKparty. We also provide a detailed analysis of the relevance of
various discourse elements and relations from the RST parse trees for machine
translation evaluation. In particular we show that: (i) all aspects of the RST
tree are relevant, (ii) nuclearity is more useful than relation type, and (iii)
the similarity of the translation RST tree to the reference tree is positively
correlated with translation quality.Comment: machine translation, machine translation evaluation, discourse
analysis. Computational Linguistics, 201
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Visualising Discourse Structure in Interactive Documents
In this paper we introduce a method for generating interactive documents which exploits the visual features of hypertext to represent discourse structure. We explore the consistent and principled use of graphics and animation to support navigation and comprehension of non-linear text, where textual discourse markers do not always work effectively
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
Intentions and Information in Discourse
This paper is about the flow of inference between communicative intentions,
discourse structure and the domain during discourse processing. We augment a
theory of discourse interpretation with a theory of distinct mental attitudes
and reasoning about them, in order to provide an account of how the attitudes
interact with reasoning about discourse structure
Specificity and definiteness in sentence and discourse structure
In this paper, I argue that this informally given list of characteristics covers only a certain subclass of specific indefinites. […] In particular, I dispute the definition of specific indefinites as "the speaker has the referent in mind" as rather confusing if one is working with a semantic theory. Furthermore, I discuss "relative specificity", it. cases in which the specific indefinite does not exhibit wide, but intermediate or narrow scope behavior. Based on such data, I argue that specificity expresses a referential dependency between introduced discourse items. Informally speaking, the specificity of the indefinite expression something [...] expresses that the reference of the expression depends on the reference of another expression, here, on the expression a monk, not the speaker
Markers of Discourse Structure in Child-Directed Speech
Although the language we encounter is typically embedded in rich discourse contexts, existing models of sentence processing focus largely on phenomena that occur sentence internally. Here we analyze a video corpus of child-caregiver interactions with the aim of characterizing how discourse structure is reflected in child-directed speech and in children’s and caregivers ’ behavior. We use topic continuity as a measure of discourse structure, examining how caregivers introduce and discuss objects across sentences. We develop a variant on a Hidden Markov Model to identify coherent discourses, taking into account speakers ’ intended referent and the time delays between utterances. Using the discourses found by this model, we analyze how the lexical, syntactic, and social properties of caregiver-child interaction change over the course of a sequence of topically-related utterances. Our findings suggest that cues used to signal topicality in adult discourse are also available in child-directed speech and that children’s responses reflect joint attention in communication
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