We use a reliably annotated corpus to compare metrics of coherence based on Centering Theory with respect to their potential usefulness for text structuring in natural language generation. Previous corpus-based evaluations of the coherence of text according to Centering did not compare the coherence of the chosen text structure with that of the possible alternatives. A corpusbased methodology i...

The present study tested whether engaging in a mindfulness centering exercise 5 minutes before a session could have a positive impact on therapy, in particular on the therapists' ability to remain present in session and on session outcomes. Results indicated that therapists perceived themselves as being more present in session when they prepared for their sessions by engaging in a mindfulness c...

Based on empirical evidence from a free word order language (German) we propose a fundamental revision of the principles guiding the ordering of discourse entities in the forward-looking centers within the centering model. We claim that grammatical role criteria should be replaced by indicators of the functional information structure of the utterances, i.e., the distinction between context-boun...

This paper presents an integration of centering theory ([GJW95]) into incremental dynamic logic. The formalism is based on an idea found in [vE00a], where contexts are permutable in order to model salience. Building on this idea, centering theory is restated as a formalism on contexts. Subsequently the system is used to consider some problems centering theory has once plurality is taken into ac...

Multilevel models are becoming increasingly used in applied educational social and economic research for the analysis of hierarchically nested data. In these random coefficient regression models the parameters are allowed to differ over the groups in which the observations are nested. For computational ease in deriving parameter estimates, predictors are often centered around the mean. In neste...

We present a semantic and pragmatic account of the anaphoric properties of past and perfect that improves on previous work by integrating discourse structure, aspectual type, surface structure and commonsense knowledge. A novel aspect of our account is that we distinguish between two kinds of temporal intervals in the interpretation of temporal operators-discourse reference intervals and event ...

This work analyzes centered binary Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) and binary Deep Boltzmann Machines (DBMs), where centering is done by subtracting offset values from visible and hidden variables. We show analytically that (i) centering results in a different but equivalent parameterization for artificial neural networks in general, (ii) the expected performance of centered binary RBMs/DB...

In this paperwe comparepronoun resolution algorithmsand introduce a centering algorithm(LeftRightCentering) that adheres to the constraints and rules of centering theory and is an alternative to Brennan, Friedman, and Pollard’s (1987) algorithm. We then use the Left-Right Centering algorithm to see if two psycholinguistic claims on Cf-list ranking will actually improve pronoun resolution accura...