We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify brain regions involved in the process of mapping coherent discourse onto a developing mental representation. We manipulated discourse coherence by presenting sentences with definite articles (which lead to more coherent discourse) or indefinite articles (which lead to less coherent discourse). Comprehending connected discourse, co...

This is a preliminary report on a set of techniques for translating the discourse representation structures (DRSes) of Kamp (1981) into semantically equivalent clauses in a slightly extended form of Prolog. Together with discourse representation theory (DRT) itself, these techniques yield a system for translating English into Prolog. A working prototype has been built using Quintus Prolog on a ...

This study discusses the possibility of the integrated analytic approach to discourse in CSCL by the combination of macro network analysis and micro analysis of argument on students’ written discourse. Although studies have established fine-grained analytic approaches to discourse or argumentation in CSCL environments, we still have difficulty with evaluating collective knowledge advancement. T...

1 Description theory Traditionally, grammars generate concrete data structures. Typically, these are trees whose nodes are labelled with syntactic and semantic information. However, a number of approaches have questioned this basic assumption arguing that grammars should manipulate more abstract structures namely descriptions of trees. In this paper, we show that a description-based approach is...

Nick Asher: (Invited): Constraints in Discourse: Part of a more general theory of rationality? SDRT promotes two central ideas relevant to constraints in discourse: (1) dynamic semantic update is constrained by discourse structure; (2) discourse coherence is a scalar phenomenon and so discourse structure construction should proceed by maximizing discourse coherence given the resources available...

In this paper we present the first ever, to the best of our knowledge, discourse parser for multi-party chat dialogues. Discourse in multi-party dialogues dramatically differs from monologues since threaded conversations are commonplace rendering prediction of the discourse structure compelling. Moreover, the fact that our data come from chats renders the use of syntactic and lexical informatio...

We present a set of discourse structure relations that are easy to code, and develop criteria for an appropriate data structure for representing these relations. Discourse structure here refers to informational relations that hold between sentences in a discourse (cf. Hobbs, 1985). We evaluated whether trees are a descriptively adequate data structure for representing coherence. Trees are widel...

This paper investigates that brief connections between usages of left-dislocations in American discourse and functions for developing conversation statuses based on analyses pragmatics.It also reveals speakers’ intentions are shown a maintaining topic continuity as tool function.It is hard to account word order manipulative; however, hypotheses we can bear out technically demonstrated.As the po...

We describe the SemEval-2010 shared task on “Linking Events and Their Participants in Discourse”. This task is an extension to the classical semantic role labeling task. While semantic role labeling is traditionally viewed as a sentence-internal task, local semantic argument structures clearly interact with each other in a larger context, e.g., by sharing references to specific discourse entiti...