Computational approaches to discourse understanding have a two-part goal: (1) identifying those aspects of discourse understanding that require process-based accounts, and (2) characterizing the processes and data structures they involve. To date, in the area of reference, process-based accounts have been developed for reference via anaphoric pronouns and via definite descriptors. In this paper...

This paper proposes a new approach to discourse directionality, a phenomenon which, as is well known, is neither well defined nor adequately accounted for. Directionality is the property of (a part of) a discourse to be directed towards a 'goal', usually implying asymmetric functional relations between the discourse units involved. The direction of such an asymmetric discourse relation depends ...

The current article presents results from three quantitative corpus studies on the use of demonstrative expressions (demonstrative NPs, demonstrative pronouns) in German, English and Russian. It focuses on two prevalent hypotheses: 1) demonstratives correspond to the medium activation level; 2) demonstratives establish discourse topics. As for (1), it has been repeatedly claimed that referentia...

This paper presents a novel approach to discourse analysis within information extraction systems. It makes use of DRT as formal representation of the linguistic context as well as of a domain-specific ontology as a basis to compute conceptual relations between extracted events thus establishing discourse coherence. The approach has been implemented within GenIE, an information extraction system...

The critical study of political discourse has up until very recently rested solely within the domain of the social sciences. Working within a linguistics framework, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), in particular Fairclough (Fairclough 1989, 1995a, 1995b, 2001; Fairclough and Wodak 1997), has been heavily influenced by Foucault. 2 The linguistic theory that CDA and critical linguistics especia...

I propose a model for determining the hearer's attentional state which depends solely on a list of salient discourse entities (S-list). The ordering among the elements of the S-list covers also the function of the backward-looking center in the centering model. The ranking criteria for the S-list are based on the distinction between hearer-old and hearer-new discourse entities and incorporate p...

Pauses in spontaneous speech have a less restricted distribution than pauses in read discourse; however, they are not distributed in a haphazard way. The majority of the perceived pauses in the examined Swedish spontaneous speech material, 73%, occurred in one of the following positions: between sentences, after discourse markers and conjunctions, and before accented content words. There is a r...

In recent proposals for the crucial internal structure of the framing Contextual Component within Functional Discourse Grammar (Hengeveld & Mackenzie 2006, 2008) — for example by Rijkhoff (2008:88-97) and Connolly (2007) —, what is here called text is considered as equivalent to discourse within an account of the NP (Rijkhoff) or of context (Connolly). The article purports to show that this con...

This paper explores the phenomenon of distributivity manifest in ellipsis in Chinese. It will be proposed that in addition to standard syntactical distributivity projection a distributive reading also results from a focus projection that involves anaphoric relations from context. A distributive reading will occur if an elided string is anaphorically associated with a previous discourse that sha...

This paper shows a proposal for Type-reduction of an Interval Type-2 fuzzy set composed from α-cuts done over its primary membership functions. The definition of available Type-reduction methods for Interval Type-2 fuzzy sets are based on an homogeneous subdivision of the universe of discourse, so we propose an approximation algorithm for Type-reduction of an Interval type-2 fuzzy set through i...