We investigated whether modal information elicited empirical effects with regard to discourse processing. That is, like tense information, one of the linguistic factors shown to be relevant in organizing a discourse representation is modality, where the mood of an utterance indicates whether or not it is asserted. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used in order to address the question of the...

We propose an architecture for integrating discourse processing and speech recognition (SR) in spoken dialogue systems. It was first developed for computer-mediated bilingual dialogue in voiceto-voice machine translation applications and we apply it here to a distributed battlefield simulation system used for military training. According to this architecture discourse functions previously distr...

In this paper we present ongoing work to produce an expressive TTS reader that can be used both in text and dialogue applications. The system has been previously used to read (English) poetry and it has now been extended to apply to short stories. The text is fully analyzed both at phonetic and phonological level, and at syntactic and semantic level. The core of the system is the Prosodic Manag...

In this paper we will present our ongoing work on a plan-based discourse processor developed in the context of the Enthusiast Spanish to English translation system as part of the JANUS multilingual speech-to-speech translation system. We will demonstrate that theories of discourse which postulate a strict tree structure of discourse on either the intentional or attentional level are not totally...

Figurative language poses a serious challenge to NLP systems. The use of idiomatic and metaphoric expressions is not only extremely widespread in natural language; many figurative expressions, in particular idioms, also behave idiosyncratically. These idiosyncrasies are not restricted to a non-compositional meaning but often also extend to syntactic properties, selectional preferences etc. To d...

Cognitive deficits across a wide range of domains have been consistently observed in schizophrenia and are linked to poor functional outcome (Green, 1996; Carter, 2006). Language abnormalities are among the most salient and include disorganized speech as well as deficits in comprehension. In this review, we aim to evaluate impairments of language processing in schizophrenia in relation to a dom...

We review psycholinguistic research on the use of intonation in dialogue, focusing on our own recent work. In experiments using complex real-world tasks and naïve speakers and listeners, we show that speakers reliably specific prosodic cues to signal their intensions, and that listeners use these cues to recognize syntactic and pragmatic aspects of discourse meaning.

1 This paper presents an adaptable online Multilingual Discourse Processing System (MultiDPS), composed of four natural language processing tools: named entity recognizer, anaphora resolver, clause splitter and a discourse parser. This NLP Meta System allows any user to run it on the web or via web services and, if necessary, to build its own processing chain, by incorporating knowledge or reso...

Discourse is coming in from the cold. After years of being ignored by researchers in other areas of computational linguistics and language technology, many of these same researchers are beginning to think that their own work could benefit from treating text as more than just a bag of sentences. That is, they are beginning to think that discourse offers some low-hanging fruit—achievable improvem...

Probabilistic models of sentence comprehension are increasingly relevant to questions concerning human language processing. However, such models are often limited to syntactic factors. This restriction is unrealistic in light of experimental results suggesting interactions between syntax and other forms of linguistic information in human sentence processing. To address this limitation, this art...