Considering data obtained from a corpus of database QA dialogues, we address the nature of the discourse structure needed to resolve the several kinds of contextual phenomena found in our corpus. We look at the thematic relations holding between questions and the preceding context and discuss to which extent thematic relatedness plays a role in discourse structure.

A central concern of linguistic theory is to account for how the arguments of a given lexical item are associated with positions in a syntactic structure. Many theorists hold that this mapping is mediated by a so-called thematic hierarchy. In Principles-and-Parameters style theories this typically works as follows. A verb selects arguments with certain thematic (θ-) roles. These θ−roles are ran...

A central concern of linguistic theory is to account for how the arguments of a given lexical item are associated with positions in a syntactic structure. Many theorists hold that this mapping is mediated by a so-called thematic hierarchy. In Principles-and-Parameters style theories this typically works as follows. A verb selects arguments with certain thematic (θ-) roles. These θ−roles are ran...

Thematic maps in the context of information retrieval are tools that graphically present documents and characterising terms. We investigated the usefulness of thematic maps in a laboratory experiment comparing a thematic map with a command language interface. Six subjects solved eight search tasks producing ten hours of logged and tape-recorded data. The experiment revealed no improvement in th...

Thematic maps in the context of information retrieval are tools that graphically present documents and characterising terms. We investigated the usefulness of thematic maps in a laboratory experiment comparing a thematic map with a command language interface. Six subjects solved eight search tasks producing ten hours of logged and tape-recorded data. The experiment revealed no improvement in th...