[1] Is there yet any serious discourse theory with testable computational and empirical consequences? [2] What phenomena ought a processing theory of discourse understanding/generation to address itself that are not already being attended to currently? [3] What aspects of discourse are language problems and which are general AI/KR problems? [4] What makes a theory of discourse a processing theo...

The choice and processing of referential expressions depend on the referents' status within the discourse, such that pronouns are generally preferred over full repetitive references when the referent is salient. Here we report two visual-world experiments showing that: (1) in spoken language comprehension, this preference is reflected in delayed fixations to referents mentioned after repeated d...

Discourse connectives are words or phrases such as once, since, and on the contrary that explicitly signal the presence of a discourse relation. There are two types of ambiguity that need to be resolved during discourse processing. First, a word can be ambiguous between discourse or non-discourse usage. For example, once can be either a temporal discourse connective or a simply a word meaning “...

Our interpretation of the information obtainable from a dialogue is beyond that which can be directly derived from the lexical content. Grosz and Sidner (1986) and Hobbs et al (1993) use this in their resprective theories of discourse interpretation where the information expressed in the discourse is modelled using the cognitive states of the discourse participants to capture the processing of ...

We present an implementation of a discourse parsing system for a lexicalized TreeAjoining Grammar for discourse, specifying the integration of sentence and discourse level processing. Our system is based on the assumption that the compositional aspects of semantics at the discourse-level parallel those at the sentence-level. This coupling is achieved by factoring away inferential semantics and ...

Abstract. With respect to discourse organisation, the most basic way of signalling the speaker’s or writer’s intentions is to use explicit lexical markers: so-called discourse markers or discourse connectives. While a lexicon of discourse connectives associated with the relations they express can be very useful for researchers, especially in Natural Language Processing, few projects aim at coll...

An important aspect of discourse understanding and generation involves the recognition and processing of discourse relations. These are conveyed by discourse connectives, i.e., lexical items like because and as a result or implicit connectives expressing an inferred discourse relation. The Penn Discourse TreeBank (PDTB) provides annotations of the argument structure, attribution and semantics o...

Processing discourse connectives is important for tasks such as discourse parsing and generation. For these tasks, it is useful to know which connectives can signal the same coherence relations. This paper presents experiments into modelling the substitutability of discourse connectives. It shows that substitutability effects distributional similarity. A novel variancebased function for compari...

We present an implementation of a discourse parsing system for a lexicalized Tree-Ajoining Grammar for discourse, specifying the integration of sentence and discourse level processing. Our system is based on the assumption that the compositional aspects of semantics at the discourse-level parallel those at the sentence-level. This coupling is achieved by factoring away inferential semantics and...