In commenting on PRC's performance in MUC-3, we reported [1] that the component of ou r system that could most improve performance was discourse analysis . The MUC-4 exercise has strongly confirmed that view. We added a new discourse module to PAKTUS, made very fe w changes to the other system components, and the result was significantly improved performance . This paper discusses our test resu...

Tile most common assumption about intention in discourse is that the primary intention of discourse is to eomlnunicate and receive information. This is a founding assumption of every formal model of discourse meaning that I am aware of. The standard account of meaning is that utterances are functions from contexts to contexts whose pr imary purpose is to describe the world, and whose meaning de...

the fundamental role of discourse and its positive and negative effects in personal and social interactions is known to everyone. this is why religions and denominations have always relied on discourse, especially when it is beyond the boundaries of personal concerns and by the expansion of its domain, have stressed on the vital position and particular role of discourse in the fate of humanity....

This paper presents an in-depth study of the semantics of the French discourse marker alors ‘at that time, then, so’. Its evolution from temporal adverbial with local anaphoric meaning to polysemous marker including conversation management uses in spoken French is traced through a systematic diachronic corpus analysis. Of particular interest in this perspective is the relationship between the d...

This paper presents results of an empirical analysis on the structuring of spoken discourse focusing upon how some particular utterance components in Chinese spoken dialogues are highlighted. A restricted number of words frequently and regularly found within utterances structure the dialogues by marking certain significant locations. Furthermore, a variety of signals of monitoring and repairing...

We show in this paper how the computer science concept of ’continuations’, together with categorial grammars and a type shifting mechanism, is able to account for a wide range of natural language semantic phenomena, such as hierarchical discourse structure, ellipses, accommodation and free-focus and bound-focus anaphora. The merit of continuations in the dynamic semantics framework is that they...

Intonation, long thought to be a key to effectiveness in spoken language, is more and more commonly addressed in English language teaching through the use of speech visualization technology. While the use of visualization technology is a crucial advance in the teaching of intonation, such teaching can be further enhanced by connecting technology to an understanding of how intonation functions i...

In addition to deciding what to say, s p e a k ers must decide how t o s a y it. The central premise of studies on the relationship between syntax and discourse function is that a speaker's use of a particular structural option is constrained by s p e-ciic aspects of the context of utterance. Work in discourse has uncovered a variety of speciic discourse functions served by individual syntactic...

In the proposed doctoral work we will design an end-to-end approach for the challenging NLP task of text-level discourse parsing. Instead of depending on mostly hand-engineered sparse features and independent components for each subtask, we propose a unified approach completely based on deep learning architectures. To train more expressive representations that capture communicative functions an...