Is German discourse-configurational? Experimental evidence for a topic position

The German Topic Position and Null Anaphora

Towards Efficient HPSG Generation for German, a Non-Configurational Language

In this paper, we propose a rule-based method to improve efficiency in bottom-up chart generation with GG, an open-source reversible large-scale HPSG for German. Following an indepth analysis of efficiency problems in the baseline system, we show that costly combinatorial explosion in brute force bottom-up search can be largely avoided using information already contained implicitly in the input...

Aboutness topic, discourse topic and the structure of discourse

The paper addresses the relation between several dimensions along which discourse has been assumed to be structured – topical structure, hierarchical structure, QUD-structure and thematic structure – and points at previously undescribed mismatches between those. BACKGROUND ASSUMPTIONS: As discourse progresses, the aboutness topic of a sentence (Reinhart, 1981; Roberts, 2011; Krifka, 2007) may r...

Topic Identification in Discourse

This paper proposes a corpus-based language model for topic identification. We analyze the association of noun-noun and noun-verb pairs in LOB Corpus. The word association norms are based on three factors: 1) word importance, 2) pair co-occurrence, and 3) distance. They are trained on the paragraph and sentence levels for noun-noun and nounverb pairs, respectively. Under the topic coherence pos...

Topic session on discourse

Wendy Lehnert (UMass) presented a view of the coreference problem from the perspective of machine learning, i n particular, the idea of treating coreference as classification . To pursue this view, the overall coreference proble m needs to be broken up into sub-problems of the appropriate granularity that are amenable to machine-learnin g paradigms. Once a problem is identified, some of the iss...