Related papers: Discourse Coherence and Shifting Centers in Japane…
This paper has three aims: (1) to generalize a computational account of the discourse process called {\sc centering}, (2) to apply this account to discourse processing in Japanese so that it can be used in computational systems for machine…
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…
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…
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),…
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…
Sentence-final particles serve an essential role in spoken Japanese because they express the speaker's mental attitudes toward a proposition and/or an interlocutor. They are acquired at early ages and occur very frequently in everyday…
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…
For Japanese-to-English translation, zero pronouns in Japanese pose a challenge, since the model needs to infer and produce the corresponding pronoun in the target side of the English sentence. However, although fully resolving zero…
Speakers sometimes omit certain arguments of a predicate in a sentence; such omission is especially frequent in pro-drop languages. This study addresses a question about ellipsis -- what can explain the native speakers' ellipsis decisions?…
In this paper we present a formalization of the centering approach to modeling attentional structure in discourse and use it as the basis for an algorithm to track discourse context and bind pronouns. As described in Grosz, Joshi and…
Centering theory (CT; Grosz et al., 1995) provides a linguistic analysis of the structure of discourse. According to the theory, local coherence of discourse arises from the manner and extent to which successive utterances make reference to…
Discourse markers ({\it by contrast}, {\it happily}, etc.) are words or phrases that are used to signal semantic and/or pragmatic relationships between clauses or sentences. Recent work has fruitfully explored the prediction of discourse…
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…
Time pressure and topic negotiation may impose constraints on how people leverage discourse relations (DRs) in spontaneous conversational contexts. In this work, we adapt a system of DRs for written language to spontaneous dialogue using…
Conversational agents that mimic people have raised questions about the ethics of anthropomorphizing machines with human social identity cues. Critics have also questioned assumptions of identity neutrality in humanlike agents. Recent work…
In this paper, we present a method of estimating referents of demonstrative pronouns, personal pronouns, and zero pronouns in Japanese sentences using examples, surface expressions, topics and foci. Unlike conventional work which was…
Discourse analysis allows us to attain inferences of a text document that extend beyond the sentence-level. The current performance of discourse models is very low on texts outside of the training distribution's coverage, diminishing the…
Zero pronouns (ZPs) are frequently omitted in pro-drop languages (e.g. Chinese, Hungarian, and Hindi), but should be recalled in non-pro-drop languages (e.g. English). This phenomenon has been studied extensively in machine translation…
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…
We present CALLS, a Japanese speech corpus that considers phone calls in a customer center as a new domain of empathetic spoken dialogue. The existing STUDIES corpus covers only empathetic dialogue between a teacher and student in a school.…