It is generally agreed that discourse has a recursive structure and that this structure aaects the semantic interpretation of discourse. Despite this consensus however, few proposals give a precise specii-cation of how the syntax of discourse relates to its semantics. In this paper, I use a variant of Feature-Based Tree Adjoining Grammars to construct discourse structure and its associated sema...

The goal of this paper is to explore the role of clause subordination in discourse structure. Through the study of the French subordinating conjunction avant que (English before) and its interaction with discourse context, I will attempt to show that clause subordination can affect temporal structure and also discourse structure, by conveying either subordination or coordination between discour...

This paper provides a solution to discourse structure adaptation in the process of automatic hypermedia presentation generation. Existing approaches to discourse structure composition are based on the assumption that a user can comprehend relations between the elements in a discourse structure if the overall structure is semantically coherent. This assumption does not, so far, take into account...

This tutorial consists of four parts. Part I starts with a brief introduction to different bases for discourse structuring, properties of discourse structure that are relevant to LT, and accessible evidence for discourse structure. For discourse structure to be useful for language technologies, one must be able to automatically recognize or generate with it. Hence, Part II surveys computational...

It is sometimes claimed (cf. that discourse has a tree structure which reeects the semantic structure of discourse. In this paper, I argue that this claim is problematic in cases of discourse multiple dependencies i.e. cases where one discourse segment is semantically related to two discourse segments. I develop a discourse framework which is based on Scha/Polanyi 1988] but integrates ideas fro...

The connection between discourse structure and reference is well recognmed. In the system of language understanding described, discourse structure is exploited for the purposes of reference resolution and then continu/ty of reference is exploited to build the discomle ~etructure for the purposes of subsequent reference resohtion. The role of discourse structure in dereferencing, pronouns, other...

We study dependencies between discourse structure and speech recognition problems (SRP) in a corpus of speech-based computer tutoring dialogues. This analysis can inform us whether there are places in the discourse structure prone to more SRP. We automatically extract the discourse structure by taking advantage of how the tutoring information is encoded in our system. To quantify the discourse ...