Related papers: Common Topics and Coherent Situations: Interpretin…
The temporal relations that hold between events described by successive utterances are often left implicit or underspecified. We address the role of two phenomena with respect to the recovery of these relations: (1) the referential…
In linguistics, coherence can be achieved by different means, such as by maintaining reference to the same set of entities across sentences and by establishing discourse relations between them. However, most existing work on coherence…
Generating a long, coherent text such as a paragraph requires a high-level control of different levels of relations between sentences (e.g., tense, coreference). We call such a logical connection between sentences as a (paragraph) flow. In…
Entities in discourse vary in salience: main participants, objects and locations stay prominent, while others are quickly forgotten, raising questions about how humans signal and infer discourse-level salience. Using a graded…
Coherence theorems for covariant structures carried by a category have traditionally relied on the underlying term rewriting system of the structure being terminating and confluent. While this holds in a variety of cases, it is not a…
Coherent discourse is distinguished from a mere collection of utterances by the satisfaction of a diverse set of constraints, for example choice of expression, logical relation between denoted events, and implicit compatibility with…
We deepen the study of conjoined and disjoined conditional events in the setting of coherence. These objects, differently from other approaches, are defined in the framework of conditional random quantities. We show that some well known…
A given question can be defined in terms of the set of statements or assertions that answer it. Application of logical inference to these sets of assertions allows one to derive the logic of inquiry among questions. There are interesting…
Understanding natural language requires common sense, one aspect of which is the ability to discern the plausibility of events. While distributional models -- most recently pre-trained, Transformer language models -- have demonstrated…
The basic notions related to coherence phenomena are formulated. Two types of coherence are described, state coherence and transition coherence. Useful characteristics for quantifying coherence are defined, such as coherence functions,…
We provide a general account of parallelism in discourse, and apply it to the special case of resolving possible readings for instances of VP ellipsis. We show how several problematic examples are accounted for in a natural and…
Lexical inference in context (LIiC) is the task of recognizing textual entailment between two very similar sentences, i.e., sentences that only differ in one expression. It can therefore be seen as a variant of the natural language…
Coherence is a crucial aspect of evaluating text readability and can be assessed through two primary factors when evaluating an essay in a scoring scenario. The first factor is logical coherence, characterized by the appropriate use of…
These lectures deal with the problem of inductive inference, that is, the problem of reasoning under conditions of incomplete information. Is there a general method for handling uncertainty? Or, at least, are there rules that could in…
Identifying the salience (i.e. importance) of discourse units is an important task in language understanding. While events play important roles in text documents, little research exists on analyzing their saliency status. This paper…
In this work, we systematically investigate how well current models of coherence can capture aspects of text implicated in discourse organisation. We devise two datasets of various linguistic alterations that undermine coherence and test…
We provide a wide-ranging study of the scenario where a subset of the relations in a relational vocabulary are visible to a user --- that is, their complete contents are known --- while the remaining relations are invisible. We also have a…
We present a new method for characterizing the interpretive possibilities generated by elliptical constructions in natural language. Unlike previous analyses, which postulate ambiguity of interpretation or derivation in the full clause…
Anaphora and ellipses are two common phenomena in dialogues. Without resolving referring expressions and information omission, dialogue systems may fail to generate consistent and coherent responses. Traditionally, anaphora is resolved by…
This paper discusses the processes by which conversants in a dialogue can infer whether their assertions and proposals have been accepted or rejected by their conversational partners. It expands on previous work by showing that logical…