This paper describes work to enhance a sentencebased summarizer with notions of salience, dynamicallyadjustable summary size, discourse segmentation, and awareness of topic shifts. Our experiments study strategies to diversify the application of a baseline summarizer, by making it aware of finer-grained ‘aboutness’, capable of discerning changes of topic, and sensitive to longer-thanusual docum...

The topic of race is often ignored, glossed over, or diluted with other concepts such as multicultural issues or diversity. We know that racial opinions, feelings, and beliefs operate in subtle but powerful ways even when there is no explicit intention. Unfortunately, racial discourse is curiously absent or under-discussed in the academic arena (Apple, 1999). In the academic domain where the qu...

This study explores how prosodic information can be used in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). A system was built which automatically identifies topic boundaries in a corpus of broadcast radio news. We evaluate the effectiveness of different types of features, including textual, durational, F0, Tilt and ToBI features in that system. These features were suggested by a review of the literature o...

The last decade has seen rigorous activities in the field of Sanskrit computational linguistics pertaining to word level and sentence level analysis. In this paper we point out the need of special treatment for Sanskrit at discourse level owing to specific trends in Sanskrit in the production of its literature ranging over two millennia. We present a tagset for inter-sentential analysis followe...

Coreference resolution is a major task of natural language processing. Although the mention-pair model is one of the most influential learning-based coreference models, it is hard to make any further improvements of the performance because of its inherent defects. From the perspective of discourse analysis, a micro-topic model based on the theme-rheme structure is proposed for coreference resol...

The starting point of this paper is the observation that in a question-answer dialog the use of but instead of and is obligatory if the answer is overinformative in that it includes an additional topic. A focus-semantic analysis of but is presented showing that (a) but is focus-sensitive and (b) but requires a denial with respect to the appropriate quaestio. This analysis provides a uniform bas...

Discourse Functions in LFG • One school of thought integrates discourse functions such as topic and focus with the grammatical functions at the same level of representation (e.g., Bresnan 2001). • Another school of thought seeks to represent them at an independent level (e.g., King 1997), modeling the interactions in a more complex way. This talk follows the latter position (King 1997) and furt...