The paper addresses the relation between several dimensions along which discourse has been assumed to be structured – topical structure, hierarchical structure, QUD-structure and thematic structure – and points at previously undescribed mismatches between those. BACKGROUND ASSUMPTIONS: As discourse progresses, the aboutness topic of a sentence (Reinhart, 1981; Roberts, 2011; Krifka, 2007) may r...

This paper proposes a corpus-based language model for topic identification. We analyze the association of noun-noun and noun-verb pairs in LOB Corpus. The word association norms are based on three factors: 1) word importance, 2) pair co-occurrence, and 3) distance. They are trained on the paragraph and sentence levels for noun-noun and nounverb pairs, respectively. Under the topic coherence pos...

Wendy Lehnert (UMass) presented a view of the coreference problem from the perspective of machine learning, i n particular, the idea of treating coreference as classification . To pursue this view, the overall coreference proble m needs to be broken up into sub-problems of the appropriate granularity that are amenable to machine-learnin g paradigms. Once a problem is identified, some of the iss...

The alternative to be outlined provides a proposal to solve a central problem in research on discourse structure and discourse coherence, namely, as pointed out by many authors, that of the relationship between linguistic and intentional structure, or, in other words, between subject matter and presentational relations (Mann and Thompson 1988) or informational and intentional relations (Moore a...

*Correspondence: [email protected] 2School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University, ShiZi Road, Suzhou, China Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Abstract Background: How to build a suitable discourse topic structure is an important issue in discourse topic analysis, which is the core of natural language understanding. Not only is it the key ba...

A text partition model is proposed to determine the boundaries of discourse structures. It is based on association of noun-noun relations and noun-verb relations defined on discourse level and sentence level. Three factors are considered: 1) repetition of words, 2) importance of words, and 3) collocational semantics. Ten texts serve as experimental objects. The applications of the results to se...