The following main ideas have been pointed out and put to work within our paper: (a) Information Structure (IS) theories (topic-focus, theme-rheme, background-contrast, informational and contrastive focus, focus projection rules, etc.) on text are shown to behave currently as a consistent linguistic tool that can stand behind a correct, language and contextual-depending, mapping of text into sp...

String representations of events are applied to Robin Cooper’s proposal that propositions in natural language semantics are types of situations. Links with the higher types of prooftheoretic semantics are forged, deepening type-theoretic interpretations of Discourse Representation Structures to encompass event structures.

Linguistic annotation is the process of adding additional notations to raw linguistic data for descriptive or analytical purposes. In the tagging of complex Chinese and multilingual linguistic data with a sophisticated linguistic framework, immediate visualization of the complex multi-layered functional and discourse structures is crucial for both speeding up the tagging process and reducing er...

Granularity is the concept of breaking down an event into smaller parts or granules such that each individual granule plays a part in the higher level event. Humans can seamlessly shift their granularity perspectives while reading or understanding a text. To emulate such a mechanism, we describe a theory for inferring this information automatically from raw input text descriptions and some back...

This paper describes initial studies in the context of a new effort within ISO to design an international standard for the annotation of discourse with semantic relations that are important for its coherence, “discourse relations”. This effort takes the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) as its starting point, and applies a methodology for defining semantic annotation languages which distinguishes ...

Predicting discourse structure on naturally occurring texts and dialogs is challenging and computationally intensive. Attempts to construct hand-built systems have run into problems both in how to specify the required knowledge and how to perform the necessary computations in an efficient manner. Data-driven approaches have recently shown to be successful for handling challenging aspects of dis...

In this article, we investigate aspects of sentential meaning that are not expressed in local predicate–argument structures. In particular, we examine instances of semantic arguments that are only inferable from discourse context. The goal of this work is to automatically acquire and process such instances, which we also refer to as implicit arguments, to improve computational models of languag...

Model checking for First Order Logic is a computationally demanding task. Matters become worse in systems that typically yield fairly large and complex formulas, and that also include the representation of pluralities. This is the case of Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp and Reyle 1993), in which representations encode discourse chunks and deal with various plural phenomena. Not surprising...

Halliday (1984) argues that the study of language as a uniied object can only be jus-tiied if linguists address language simultaneously as both a process and a system of relations. Birmingham-style Discourse Analysis (DA) is one model of discourse that has been developed to satisfy Halliday's challenge. However, DA has only been applied to two-party discourse, and would seem to fall short of ac...

This paper explores the possibilities and limits of a discourse grammar applied to spontaneous speech. Most discourse grammars (e.g. SDRT, Asher, 1993; RST, Mann & Thompson, 1988) tend to be descriptive theories of written discourse which presuppose a coherent structure. This structure is the outcome of a goal directed planning process on the part of the producer. In order to obtain a better un...