Human spoken language production is directed towards communication delivering comprehensible information to recipients. Speech segmentation into small units efficiently enhances a sensible and interpretable discourse structure. Such processing units in real-life communication may be applied to semantic, syntactic, or prosodic structures. Previous studies have proposed various theories of speech...

This article examines the effects of age, cognition, and discourse skills on the clinical manifestations of formal thought disorder in 31 children with schizophrenia, 14 with schizotypal personality disorder (SPD), and 70 who were normal. The communication deficits of the 31 children with schizophrenia have three characteristics: illogical thinking, loose associations, and impaired discourse sk...

Identifying discourse relations in a text is essential for various tasks in Natural Language Processing, such as automatic text summarization, question-answering, and dialogue generation. The first step of this process is segmenting a text into elementary units. In this paper, we present a novel model of discourse segmentation based on sequential data labeling. Namely, we use Conditional Random...

Words that are semantically congruous with their preceding discourse context are easier to process than words that are semantically incongruous with their context. This facilitation of semantic processing is reflected by an attenuation of the N400 event-related potential (ERP). We asked whether this was true of emotional words in emotional contexts where discourse congruity was conferred throug...

While information status (IS) plays a crucial role in discourse processing, there have only been a handful of attempts to automatically determine the IS of discourse entities. We examine a related but more challenging task, fine-grained IS determination, which involves classifying a discourse entity as one of 16 IS subtypes. We investigate the use of rich knowledge sources for this task in comb...

In this paper, we present a cognitive model of the production and comprehension of referring expressions in discourse. Our cognitive model incorporates the linguistic notion of accessibility and the mechanism of perspective taking to select the best referring expression to be used in a particular linguistic discourse. We discuss several predictions that follow from our implementation. On the ba...

Computational modeling of discourse structure is a fundamental component of theoretical and application-oriented work in natural language processing. A representation of the underlying structure of a discourse enhances the ability of a natural language system to interpret and generate a wide variety of linguistic phenomena. This symposium was designed to bring together researchers in different ...

In contrast to expectation-based, predictive views of discourse comprehension, a model is developed in which the initial processing is strictly bottom-up. Word meanings are activated, propositions are formed, and inferences and elaborations are produced without regard to the discourse context. However, a network of interrelated items is created in this manner, which can be integrated into a coh...

The Chinese comma signals the boundary of discourse units and also anchors discourse relations between adjacent text spans. In this work, we propose a discourse structureoriented classification of the comma that can be automatically extracted from the Chinese Treebank based on syntactic patterns. We then experimented with two supervised learning methods that automatically disambiguate the Chine...

The automatic identification of direct and indirect discourses and the association of each “direct” utterance with its author are research topics that begin to be explored in Natural Language Processing. We developed the DID system that when applied to children stories starts by classifying the utterances that belong to the narrator (indirect discourse) and those belonging to the characters tak...