Ill this paper, we present the theoretica.1 foun(la.tions which underlie our current research. We emphasize a methodologicaJ point: connections among proposed theories of discourse structure must be carefiflly explicated. By making these connections, we ca.n (letermilm whether theories ma.ke equiva.lent claims, consistent 1)ut unrelated cla.ims or differ iu substa.ntive issues. A synthesis of c...

Many theories of discourse structure rely on the idea that the segments comprising the discourse are linked through inferred relations such as causality and temporal contiguity. These theories suggest that all of the information needed to determine the relation can be found when the discourse is interpreted through the application of world knowledge. However, Sanders (1997) found that the inter...

The goal of this paper is to lay a logical foundation for discourse theories by providing an algebraic foundation of compositional formalisms for discourse semantics as an analogon to the simply typed-calculus. Just as that can be specialized to type theory by simply providing a special type for truth values and postulating the quantiiers and connectives as constants with xed semantics, the pro...

About half of the discourse relations annotated in Penn Discourse Treebank (Prasad et al., 2008) are not explicitly marked using a discourse connective. But we do not have extensive theories of when or why a discourse relation is marked explicitly or when the connective is omitted. Asr and Demberg (2012a) have suggested an information-theoretic perspective according to which discourse connectiv...

About half of the discourse relations annotated in Penn Discourse Treebank (Prasad et al., 2008) are not explicitly marked using a discourse connective. But we do not have extensive theories of when or why a discourse relation is marked explicitly or when the connective is omitted. Asr and Demberg (2012a) have suggested an information-theoretic perspective according to which discourse connectiv...

We discuss similarities between midutterance self-correction, which is often seen as a phenomenon that lies outside the scope of theories of dialogue meaning, and other discourse phenomena, and argue that an approach that captures these similarities is desirable. We then provide a sketch of such an approach, using Ginzburg’s KoS formalism, and discuss the implications of including ‘sub-utteranc...

Attentional State Theory and Rhetorical Structure Theory are two predominant theories of discourse parsing. Combining these two approaches, in this paper, we describe a novel approach for discourse parsing. The resulting discourse tree structure retains following properties: structure of purpose from Attentional State Theory and relations between sentences from Rhetorical Structure Theory. We d...

The candidate connrms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. 2 1 Abstract The last two decades have witnessed the development of theories dealing with discourse. Contributions from Linguistics, Philosophy, and Logics have helped to expand the knowledge of the eld. But, independently of the researchers' v...

Our interpretation of the information obtainable from a dialogue is beyond that which can be directly derived from the lexical content. Grosz and Sidner (1986) and Hobbs et al (1993) use this in their resprective theories of discourse interpretation where the information expressed in the discourse is modelled using the cognitive states of the discourse participants to capture the processing of ...

Computational theories of discourse are concerned with the context-based interpretation or generation of discourse phenomena in text and dialogue. In the past, research in this area focused on specifying the mechanisms underlying particular discourse phenomena; the models proposed were often motivated by a few constructed examples. While this approach led to many theoretical advances, models de...