Articles

The ways in which the form of referring expressions interacts with the structure of language are reviewed. Evidence from a number of different methods - quantitatively analyzed judgements of acceptable coreference, reading time, and corpus frequency of different types of coreferenfial expressions - converges on a fairly simple description of …...

In order to produce coherent text. natural lan- guage generation systems must have the ability to generate pronouns in the appropriate places. In the past, pronoun usage was primarily inves- tigated with respect to the accessibility of ref- erents. We.argue that generating appropriate referring expressions requires looking at fac- tors …...

We compare the potential of two classes of finear and hierarchical models of discourse to determine co-reference links and resolve anaphors. The com- parison uses a corpus of thirty texts, which were manually annotated for co-reference'and discourse structure. 1...

This paper explores the idqa that the operations of positing and resolving bridging anaphora in NPs with deverbal heads can be successfully guided by considering as possible implicit relations those sug- gested by the argument structures of the correspond- ing verbs. We exploit the event/result reading dis- tinction, combined with …...

Anaphora in multi-modal dialogues have different aspects compared to the anaphora in language-only dialogues. They often refer to the items signified by a gesture or by visual means. In this paper, we define two kinds of anaphora: screen anaphora and referring anaphora, and propose two general methods to resolve these …...

Accessibility of candidate referents is a crucial factor in successful reference assignment and this intuition has been adequately accommodated and developed in centering theory. By contrast, another equally important factor involved in reference assignment, namely, accessibility of contextual assumptions, seems to have not been addressed fully as a part of …...

We describe an approach to resolving definite de- scriptious and pronominal anaphora as subcases of a general strategy for presupposition satisfaction. Generally, a presupposition is satisfied in a context if the context contains a specific type of information and is organized in such a way that this information can be …...

The structure of a discourse is reflected in many as- pects of its linguistic realization, including its lexi- cal, prosodic, syntactic, and semantic nature. Multi- party dialog contains a particular kind of discourse structure, the dialog act (DA). Like other types of structure, the dialog act sequence of a conversation …...

The purpose of this paper is to identify effective fac- tors for selecting discourse organization cue phrases in instruction dialogue that signal changes in dis- course structure such as topic shifts and attentional state changes. By using a machine learning tech- nique, a variety of features concerning discourse structure, task …...

A spontaneously spoken, natural Japanese discourse contains many instances of the so-called redundant in- terjections and of back-channel utterances. These ex- pressions have not hitherto received much attention and few systematic analyses have been made, since they were regarded as useless, spurious expressions. On the basis of the analysis of …...

We here explore a "fully" lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar for discourse that takes the basic ele- ments of a (monologic) discourse to be not simply clauses, but larger structures that are anchored on variously realized discourse cues. This link with intra-sentential grammar suggests an account for dif- ferent patterns of discourse …...

While it seems intuitively obvious that many dis- course markers (DMs) are able to express discourse relations (DRs) which exist independently, the spe- cific contribution of DMs - if any - is not clear. In this paper, we investigate the status of some conse- quence DMs in French. We observe …...

The concern of this paper is the signalling of segments and relations in written texts. It explores the role of visual formatting and its relation to lexical and other markers. Through a corpus-based study of a specific "text object" - definitions - in instructional texts, it brings together two models …...

In spite of their important quantitative role, discourse particles have so far been ne- glected in automatic speech processing for two reasons: Firstly it is not clear what they may contribute to the aims of auto- matic speech processing, and secondly their functions seem to vary so much that it …...

: In Japanese and English conver- sation corpora we have found an interesting discourse marker: a 110 millisecond region of low pitch region, which can cue back-channel feedback from the hearer. We have also found that many back-channel responses appear to be more explainable if considered not as words, but …...

RASTA (Rhetorical Structure Theory Analyzer), a system for automatic discourse analysis, reliably, identifies rhetorical relations present m written discourse by examining information available in syntactic and logical form analyses. Since there is a many-to-many relationship between rhetorical relations and elements of linguistic form, RASTA identifies relations by the convergence of …...

This paper tackles the methodological question of how coherence relations and their surface cues, e.g. causal connectives, may be categorised into different discourse domains. In this context, the central issue is the need for explicit and objective criteria that can be applied by different analysts to all kinds of natural …...

Electronic Essay Rater (e-rater) is a prototype automated essay scoring system built at Educational Testing Service (ETS) that uses discourse marking, in addition to syntactic information and topical content vector analyses to automatically assign essay scores. This paper gives a general description ore-rater as a whole, but its emphasis is …...

\Ve JH't'::wnt statistical rnodels of Japanese dependency analysis aud report results of some experiments to in- vestigate the pnfonuancc of the models for the use fo a partical parsing system. The statistical modeb <:u'<' rather simple compared with the recent complex mod- els <wd intesivcl,y usc lexical level information 1 …...

\Ve are proposing a new framework of statisti- cal language modeling which integrates lexical .association statistics with syntactic preference, while maintaining the modularity of those differ- ent statistics types, facilitating both training of the model and analysis of its behavior. In this paper, we report the result of an empirical …...