This paper presents a study of the effect of working memory load on the interpretation of pronouns in different discourse contexts: stories with and without a topic shift. We present a computational model (in ACT-R, Anderson, 2007) to explain how referring subjects are used and interpreted. We furthermore report on an experiment that tests predictions that follow from simulations. The results o...

texts can be analysed from different perspectives. one of the most difficult phenomena to process is discourse structure (hovy 2010). in recent years, one of the main challenges in the field of natural language processing (nlp) has been discourse parsing. research on this topic has been done for several languages, such as Japanese (Sumita et al. 1992), english (marcu 2000) and portuguese (pardo...

Sequence Models and Ranking Methods for Discourse Parsing A dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts by Ben Wellner Many important aspects of natural language reside beyond the level of a single sentence or clause, at the level of the discourse, including: reference relations such anaphora, notions of topic/...

The paper presents a computational theory for resolving Japanese zero anaphora, based on the notion of discourse segment. We see that the discourse segment reduces the domain of antecedents for zero anaphora and thus leads to their efficient resolution. Also we make crucial use of functional notions such as empathy hierarchy and minimal semantics thesis to resolve reference for zero anaphora [K...

In this article the reasons for an argument to be chosen as sentence topic are discussed. I argue that a topic expression can be prototypical or not, depending on how its thematic/semantic properties reflect humans’ preference to talk about certain things and not others. Although subjects are mostly prototypical topics, I show that a non-subject topic is prototypical with predicates that select...

The common view in the literature is that the post-verbal NP of an existential construction cannot be interpreted as the topic of its sentence, where the term “sentence topic” is construed as an expression forming a relation of aboutness between itself and the clause in which it appears. The aim of this paper is to refute this claim. First, we discuss why the discourse functions associated with...

A correct structural analysis of a discourse is a prerequisite for understanding it. This paper sketches the outline of a discourse grammar which acknowledges several different levels of structure. This gram~nar, the "Dynamic Discourse Model", uses an Augmented Transition Network parsing mechanism to build a representation of the semantics of a discourse in a stepwise fashion, from left to righ...

by relying mainly on the accessibility approach to anaphora, this article intends to analyze the types, distributions and retrieval of anaphors in two forms of spoken discourse: casual and controlled talk. for the specific purposes of the study, twenty sophomore iranian students were randomly selected to conduct the talks. the subjects were divided into two groups of casual and controlled talk....

Translating Dialects in Search: Mapping between Specialized Languages of Discourse and Documentary Languages by Vivien Petras Doctor of Philosophy in Information Management and Systems University of California, Berkeley Professor Michael K. Buckland, Chair The biggest problem in searching an information system is to find the appropriate search terms that not only represent the searcher’s inform...

In a reading production experiment we investigate the impact of punctuation and discourse structure on the prosodic differentiation of right dislocation (RD) and afterthought (AT). Both discourse structure and punctuation are likely to affect the prosodic marking of these right-peripheral constructions, as certain prosodic markings are appropriate only in certain discourse structures, and punct...