This paper contributes to the question of which degree of complexity is called for in representations of discourse structure. We review recent claims that tree structures do not suffice as a model for discourse structure, with a focus on the work done on the Discourse Graphbank (DGB) of Wolf and Gibson (2005, 2006). We will show that much of the additional complexity in the DGB is not inherent ...

In this paper, we describe how the LIDAS System (Linguistic Discourse Analysis System), a discourse parser built as an implementation of the Unified Linguistic Discourse Model (U-LDM) uses information from sentential syntax and semantics along with lexical semantic information to build the Open Right Discourse Parse Tree (DPT) that serves as a representation of the structure of the discourse (P...

* Th e papers collected here are based on presentations at the International Conference on Reference and Discourse Structure , which was organized by Sofi ana Chiriacescu and Klaus von Heusinger at the University of Stuttgart (January 15-17, 2010). We thank all participants of the conference for the lively and constructive discussion and all contributors for writing up their research results fo...

Information structure has been assumed to be an autonomous part of grammar for more than 100 years. It is represented as a partition of the sentence into two units, e.g., focus background, topic comment, focus topic, focus presupposition etc.1 Even though information structure is sometimes understood as textual or discourse structure, its organizational level is still defined with respect to th...

This paper reports on corpus-based research into the relationship between intonational variation and discourse structure. We examine the effects of speaking style (read versus spontaneous) and of discourse segmentation method (text-alone versus text-and-speech) on the nature of this relationship. We also compare the acoustic-prosodic features of initial, medial, and final utterances in a discou...