Related papers: A Centering Approach to Pronouns
One of the necessary extensions to the centering model is a mechanism to handle pronouns with intrasentential antecedents. Existing centering models deal only with discourses consisting of simple sentences. It leaves unclear how to delimit…
Centering was formulated as a model of the relationship between attentional state, the form of referring expressions, and the coherence of an utterance within a discourse segment (Grosz, Joshi and Weinstein, 1986; Grosz, Joshi and…
In this paper we propose a computational treatment of the resolution of zero pronouns in Japanese discourse, using an adaptation of the centering algorithm. We are able to factor language-specific dependencies into one parameter of the…
Centering theory posits a discourse center, a distinguished discourse entity that is the topic of a discourse. A simplified version of this theory is developed in a Dynamic Semantics framework. In the resulting system, the mechanism of…
Prior approaches to realizing mixed-initiative human--computer referential communication have adopted information-state or collaborative problem-solving approaches. In this paper, we argue for a new approach, inspired by coherence-based…
Anaphora resolution is one of the most active research areas in natural language processing. This study examines focusing as a tool for the resolution of pronouns which are a kind of anaphora. Focusing is a discourse phenomenon like…
We specify an algorithm that builds up a hierarchy of referential discourse segments from local centering data. The spatial extension and nesting of these discourse segments constrain the reachability of potential antecedents of an…
The main aim of translation is an accurate transfer of meaning so that the result is not only grammatically and lexically correct but also communicatively adequate. This paper stresses the need for discourse analysis the aim of which is to…
In human-human conversations, Context Tracking deals with identifying important entities and keeping track of their properties and relationships. This is a challenging problem that encompasses several subtasks such as slot tagging,…
This paper concerns how to generate and understand discourse anaphoric noun phrases. I present the results of an analysis of all discourse anaphoric noun phrases (N=1,233) in a corpus of ten narrative monologues, where the choice between a…
First derived from human intuition, later adapted to machine translation for automatic token alignment, attention mechanism, a simple method that can be used for encoding sequence data based on the importance score each element is assigned,…
Lattices are an efficient and effective method to encode ambiguity of upstream systems in natural language processing tasks, for example to compactly capture multiple speech recognition hypotheses, or to represent multiple linguistic…
Success of deep learning techniques have renewed the interest in development of dialogue systems. However, current systems struggle to have consistent long term conversations with the users and fail to build rapport. Topic spotting, the…
This paper explores the correlation between centering and different forms of pronominal reference in Italian, in particular zeros and overt pronouns in subject position. Such correlations, that I had proposed in earlier work (COLING 90),…
This squib examines the role of limited attention in a theory of discourse structure and proposes a model of attentional state that relates current hierarchical theories of discourse structure to empirical evidence about human discourse…
Statistical spoken dialogue systems usually rely on a single- or multi-domain dialogue model that is restricted in its capabilities of modelling complex dialogue structures, e.g., relations. In this work, we propose a novel dialogue model…
We introduce the task of predicting adverbial presupposition triggers such as also and again. Solving such a task requires detecting recurring or similar events in the discourse context, and has applications in natural language generation…
The use of conversational assistants to search for information is becoming increasingly more popular among the general public, pushing the research towards more advanced and sophisticated techniques. In the last few years, in particular,…
I present a unified account of interpretation preferences of stressed and unstressed pronouns in discourse. The central intuition is the Complementary Preference Hypothesis that predicts the interpretation preference of a stressed pronoun…
The state of the art in learning meaningful semantic representations of words is the Transformer model and its attention mechanisms. Simply put, the attention mechanisms learn to attend to specific parts of the input dispensing recurrence…