We examined the effect of interruption on reading to determine if discourse processing is susceptible to similarity-based interference. Participants read pairs of passages, either one before the other (in the continuous condition) or with the sentences of the two passages interleaved (in the interruption condition). In addition, the similarity of the types of passages (narrative or expository) ...

In Chinese, zero anaphors occur frequently. This talk discusses several issues in identification of zero anaphors. Syntactic tagging of words in a running text for detection of anaphora requires specification of argument structure for verbal elements. Verbs requiring a subject or an object can be used to locate the position of zero anaphors. Typical argument structures for verbs, however, often...

This paper used self-paced reading to test processing preferences in pronoun interpretation in English two clause sentences. The results demonstrate that people’s preferences can be reversed by changing the coherence relation between the clauses. The results are not compatible with the existence of a single all-purpose strategy in pronoun resolution. Rather, the results support Kehler’s (2002) ...

Discourse markers are words or phrases that speakers use at the beginning of a contribution to signal how it relates to prior discourse. They mark changes in the global discourse structure by e.g. signalling the beginning of a new topic or the return to a previous topic. However, words that are used as discourse markers often also have a sentential function. If discourse markers are to be used ...

In this papeh we first describe how we have customized our data-driven multilingu~fl discourse module within our text understanding system lor dill'erent lm~guages and for a particular NLP application by utilizing hierm'chic~dly organized discourse KB's. Then, we report qum~titalive and qmditative findings from ewduating the system both with and without discourse processing, ~md discuss how res...

The goal of this chapter is demonstrate one particular use of abduction in the processing of natural language discourse. DICE (Discourse In Commonsense Entailment) can be used to model both interpretation and generation. For interpretation, it uses defeasible deduction to determine the discourse structures and event structures underlying multisentential texts. For generation, it uses abduction ...

We present an implemented system for processing definite descriptions in arbitrary domains. The design of the system is based on the results of a corpus analysis previously reported, which highlighted the prevalence of discourse-new descriptions in newspaper corpora. The annotated corpus was used to extensively evaluate the proposed techniques for matching definite descriptions with their antec...

The prosody of a sentence (utterance) when it appears in a discourse context differs substantially from when it is uttered in isolation. This paper addresses why paragraph is a discourse unit and discourse prosody is an intrinsic part of naturally occurring speech. Higher level discourse information treats sentences, phrases and their lower level units as sub-units and layers over them; and rea...

Studies on garden-path sentences such as While the man hunted the deer ran into the woods have shown that comprehenders face processing difficulties due to the locally ambiguous noun phrase “the deer”. This critical noun phrase tends to be initially interpreted as the object of the preceding verb, but it must ultimately be interpreted as the subject of the following clause. This grammatical rol...

Countability of English nouns is important in various natural language processing tasks. It especially plays an important role in machine translation since it determines the range of possible determiners. This paper proposes a method for reinforcing countability prediction by introducing a novel concept called one countability per discourse. It claims that when a noun appears more than once in ...