Analyzing Explicitly-Structured Discourse in a Limited Domain: Trouble and Failure Reports

Recent theories of focusing and reference rely crucially on discourse structure to constrain the availability of discourse entities for reference, but deriving the structure of an arbitrary discourse has proved to be a significant problem. A useful level of problem reduction may be achieved by analyzing discourse in which the structure is explicit, rather than implicit. In this paper we consider a genre of explicitly-structured discourse: the Trouble and Failure Report (TFR), whose structure is both explicit and constant across discourses. We present the results of an analysis of a corpus of 331 TFRs, with particular attention to discourse segmentation and focusing. We then describe how the Trouble and Failure Report was automated in a prototype data collection and information retrieval application, using the PUNDIT natural-language processing system.