We describe the Annodis corpus of discourse structures for French. The corpus joins two perspectives on discourse on a variety of textual genres: a bottom-up approach and a top-down approach. The bottom-up view builds incrementally a structure from elementary discourse units, while the top-down view focuses on the selective annotation of multi-level discourse structures. The corpus is composed ...

We propose a statistical dialogue analysis model to determine discourse structures as well as speech acts using maximum entropy model. The model can automatically acquire probabilistic discourse knowledge from a discourse tagged corpus to resolve ambiguities. We propose the idea of tagging discourse segment boundaries to represent the structural information of discourse. Using this representati...

We present novel computational experiments using William Labov’s theory of narrative analysis. We describe his six elements of narrative structure and construct a new corpus based on his most recent work on narrative. Using this corpus, we explore the correspondence between Labovs elements of narrative structure and the implicit discourse relations of the Penn Discourse Treebank, and we constru...

• Temporal discourse markers such as after, before or while are commonly described as triggers for discourse relations expressing a temporal relation (Mann and Thompson, 1987; Knott, 1996). However, only little research has been done regarding the interaction of such discourse markers with the context within a multi-sentence discourse. Lascarides & Oberlander (1993), for instance, note that sen...

The goal of the CLARITY project is to explore the use of discourse structure in the understanding of conversational speech. Within project CLARITY we aim to develop automatic classifiers for three levels of discourse structure in Spanish telephone conversations: speech acts, dialogue games, and discourse segments. This paper presents our first results and research plans in three areas: definiti...

This paper is concerned with an approach to discourse processing via a new more general interpretation of Tree Adjoining Grammars (TAG) proposed by Vijay-Shanker (1992). This formalism is based on so-called Description trees (D-trees) (Marcus et al. 1983, Back-ofen 1995). I will discuss a discourse phenomenon commonly used as a stylistic device, namely ashback sequences. These sequences are par...

Analysis of speech acts and discourse structures is essential to a dialogue understanding system because speech acts and discourse structures are closely tied with the speaker’s intention. However, it has been difficult to infer a speech act and a discourse structure from a surface utterance because they highly depend on the context of the utterance. We propose a statistical dialogue analysis m...

The purpose of this paper is to identify e ective factors for selecting discourse organization cue phrases in instruction dialogue that signal changes in discourse structure such as topic shifts and attentional state changes. By using a machine learning technique, a variety of features concerning discourse structure, task structure, and dialogue context are examined in terms of their e ectivene...

The eeects of discourse on disambiguating (sub)expressions and the problem of computing those eeects are treated formally by imposing a labeling structure over discourse representation structures, leading to barebones forms of Segmented and Underspeciied Discourse Representation Theory.