The processing of noun-phrase (NP) anaphors in discourse is argued to reflect constraints on the activation and processing of semantic information in working memory. The proposed theory views NP anaphor processing as an optimization process that is based on the principle that processing cost, defined in terms of activating semantic information, should serve some discourse function--identifying ...

The way in which discourse features express connections back to the previous discourse has been described in the literature in terms of adjoining at the right frontier of discourse structure. But this does not allow for discourse features that express ezpectations about what is to come in the subsequent discourse. After characterizing these expectations and their distribution in text, we show h...

We show that in modeling social interaction, particularly dialogue, the attitude of obligation can be a useful adjunct to the popularly considered attitudes of belief, goal, and intention and their mutual and shared counterparts. In particular, we show how discourse obligations can be used to account in a natural manner for the connection between a question and its answer in dialogue and how ob...