Creating Local Coherence: An Empirical Assessment

Two of the mechanisms for creating natural transitions between adjacent sentences in a text, resulting in local coherence, involve discourse relations and switches of focus of attention between discourse entities. These two aspects of local coherence have been traditionally discussed and studied separately. But some empirical studies have given strong evidence for the necessity of understanding how the two types of coherence-creating devices interact. Here we present a joint corpus study of discourse relations and entity coherence exhibited in news texts from the Wall Street Journal and test several hypotheses expressed in earlier work about their interaction. Disciplines Computer Sciences Comments Louis, A. & Nenkova, A., Creating Local Coherence: An Empirical Assessment, Human Language Technologies: Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics, June 2010, doi: anthology/N10-1043 This conference paper is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/cis_papers/716 Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the ACL, pages 313–316, Los Angeles, California, June 2010. c ©2010 Association for Computational Linguistics Creating Local Coherence: An Empirical Assessment Annie Louis University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA [email protected] Ani Nenkova University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA [email protected]