This paper analyzes systematic cases of revision of the discourse structure entailing a modification of the right frontier. We show that the coordinating or subordinating nature of discourse relations plays a major role in this revision, examining in particular a relation typical in narratives, Result, as well as a family of dialogues relations: contentrelations introduced by interrogatives. Th...

Theories of discourse structure hypothesize a hierarchical structure of discourse segments, typically tree-structured. While substantial work has been done on identifying and automatically recognizing the textual and prosodic correlates of discourse structure in monologue, comparable cues for dialogue or multiparty conversation, and in particular humancomputer dialogue remain relatively less st...

In order to enrich dynamic semantic theories with a ‘pragmatic’ capacity, we combine dynamic and nonmonotonic (preferential) logics in a modal logic setting. We extend a fragment of Van Benthem and De Rijke’s dynamic modal logic with additional preferential operators in the underlying static logic, which enables us to define defeasible (pragmatic) entailments over a given piece of discourse. We...

[1] Is there yet any serious discourse theory with testable computational and empirical consequences? [2] What phenomena ought a processing theory of discourse understanding/generation to address itself that are not already being attended to currently? [3] What aspects of discourse are language problems and which are general AI/KR problems? [4] What makes a theory of discourse a processing theo...

Between the years 1935 and 1965, tens of thousands of lobotomies were performed on Americans in order to treat mental illness. This article reconstructs the relations between the theory and practice of psychosurgery and a dynamic approach to mental illness. The article claims that psychosurgical discourse adopted key concepts from psychoanalytical discourse and that psychodynamically oriented p...

Corpora of transcribed and annotated dialogues are very useful for developing and evaluating the coverage of algorithms for discourse generation and interpretation and dialogue modelling. On the other hand, there is no agreement on the choice of units and conventions for annotating discourse constituents, and the annotation process can be difficult and prone to inconsistencies. This paper prese...

1. Natural language and logical analysis 1.1 Compositionality and Frege’s puzzles 1.2 Montague Grammar 1.3 The nature of meaning-postulates 2. Towards a new theory of meaning and interpretation 2.1 Anaphora in Montague grammar 2.2 Discourse 2.3 The fallacy of misplaced information 3. Theories of dynamic interpretation 3.1 Discourse representation theory 3.2 Situation semantics 3.3 Quantificatio...

In our daily lives we assist to an exponential growth of mobile and fixed devices that surround us, though many of them having limited resources, and not even providing an interface screen. In this paper, we present remoteU¡, a middleware that allows the interaction of those devices with users, resorting to simple but expressive programming mechanisms, and providing efficient implementation and...

In natural language generation, different generation tasks often interact with each other in a complex way. We think that how to resolve the complex interactions inside and between tasks is more important to the generation of a coherent text than how to model each individual factor. This paper focuses on the interaction between aggregation and text planning, and tries to explore what preference...

In this paper we investigate how discourse structure a ects the meanings of words and how the meanings of words a ect discourse structure We integrate three ingredients a theory of discourse structure called sdrt which represents discourse in terms of rhetorical relations that glue together the propositions introduced by the text segments an accom panying theory of discourse attachment called d...