How does prior context influence lexical and discourse-level processing during real-time language comprehension? Experiment 1 examined whether the referential ambiguity introduced by a repeated, anaphoric expression had an immediate or delayed effect on lexical and discourse processing, using an eye-tracking-while-reading task. Eye movements indicated facilitated recognition of repeated express...

Computers cannot fully understand spoken language without access to the wide range of modalities that accompany speech. This thesis addresses the particularly expressive modality of hand gesture, and focuses on building structured statistical models at the intersection of speech, vision, and meaning. My approach is distinguished in two key respects. First, gestural patterns are leveraged to dis...

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...

Cognitive neuroscience and discourse processing are both young fields, yet their intersection has already produced a surprisingly rich body of results. In this chapter, we outline the major findings of past work and then describe some exciting new directions in discourse processing research. We begin with a discussion of the evolutionary origins of discourse processing, follow this with a discu...

Studies of discourse processing focus on the ways in which readers and listeners comprehend language. The linguistic segments of interest to the field tend to be larger than sound, word, or sentence-level units; they include the books and conversational communications that comprise our everyday cognitive and social interactions. The current review focuses on discourse comprehension (specificall...

Discourse processing depends on long-term semantic memory and discourse memory (i.e. the organization and maintenance of a mental model). Using event-related potentials, the information-processing functions of the activities manifested by a centroparietal negativity (N400) and a posterior positivity (P600) were investigated during the processing of inferences. On the basis of findings from sema...

Tree-Adjoining Grammars (TAG) have been used both for syntactic parsing, with sentential grammars, and for discourse parsing, with discourse grammars. But the modeling of discourse connectives (coordinate conjunctions, subordinate conjunctions , adverbs, etc.) in TAG-based formalisms for discourse differ from their modeling in sentential grammars. Because of this mismatch, an intermediate, not ...

This paper describes a new discourse module within our multilingual NLP system. Because of its unique data-driven architecture, the discourse module is language-independent. Moreover, the use of hierarchically organized multiple knowledge sources makes the module robust and trainable using discourse-tagged corpora. Separating discourse phenomena from knowledge sources makes the discourse module...

While there is some evidence that causal discourse relations are processed incrementally, the time-course of comprehending concessive discourse markers (e.g., nevertheless) has hardly been investigated. Given that concessives are often defined as negative causals, there may be similarities between the processing of concessives and negations (e.g., a delay). This paper investigates the time-cour...

Research in discourse processing has identi ed two representational requirements for discourse planning systems. First, discourse plans must adequately represent the intentional structure of the utterances they produce in order to enable a computational discourse agent to respond e ectively to communicative failures [15]. Second, discourse plans must represent the informational structure of utt...