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...

This paper presents an implemented computational model for interpreting and generating indirect answers to yes-no questions in English. Interpretation and generation are treated, respectively, as recognition of and construction of a responder's discourse plan for a full answer. An indirect answer is the result of the responder providing only part of the planned response, but intending for his d...

The automatic identification of direct and indirect discourses is a topic not yet explored in Natural Language Processing. We developed the DID system that when applied to children stories identifies the discourses, relative to the narrator (indirect discourse) or to the characters taking part in the story (direct discourse). This automation can be advantageous, namely when it is necessary to t...

We argue in this paper that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within discourse structure, instead work anaphorically to contribute relational meaning, with only indirect dependence on discourse structure. This allows a simpler discourse structure to provide scaffolding for compositional semantics, and reveals multi...

In this contribution we will address the main puzzling empirical issues that have been formulated around Free Indirect Discourse (FID): the constraints on the use of first person pronouns and of proper names (as well as of definite descriptions), the reasons why different grammatical features (person, gender, number) give rise to presuppositions that must be resolved at different levels of inte...

This paper provides an analysis of the temporal location adverb now. The core data comes from free indirect discourse, where now often co-occurs with the past tense and has an affinity for stative sentences. Building on Kamp & Reyle’s (1993) analysis, I propose that now is a perspective setting anaphor: it requires an eventuality described by an aspectual phrase to hold throughout a salient eve...

This paper reports on a study of pronominal and demonstrative indirect anaphors in English naturally occurring discourse. We show that only a small percentage of such forms meet the conditions for appropriate use encoded in the Givenness Hierarchy of Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski (1993), and argue that they should be treated as minor violations which the hearer has to repair. Such an account is...