Table 7 - uploaded by Bonnie Webber
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Discourse connectives can be analysed as encoding predicate-argument relations whose arguments derive from the interpretation of discourse units. These arguments can be anaphoric or structural. Although structural arguments can be encoded in a parse tree, anaphoric arguments must be resolved by other means. A study of nine connectives, annotating t...
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Anaphora resolution has become a major issue in natural language processing systems; in this work we propose a resolution approach in which texts are parsed by a definite clause grammar and then converted into an XML-tagged representation, where sentence elements are marked with discourse, syntactic, and semantic attributes. This extension was made...
In this chapter, we generalize our eager left-corner incremental interpreter to cover conditionals and conjunctions. We focus on the (dynamic) semantic contrast between conditionals and conjunctions because the interaction between these sentential operators and anaphora/cataphora provides a strong argument that semantic parsing needs to be incremen...
Citations
... ructurally, in the form of its matrix clause or sentence. That discourse adverbials such as instead, afterwards, as a result, etc. are anaphoric, differing from structural connectives in getting their second argument from the discourse context, is argued on theoretical grounds in (Webber et al. Webber et al. 2003 2003) and on empirical grounds in (Creswell et al. Creswell et al. 2004). It also echoes in part the claim of Halliday and Hasan Halliday and Hasan (1976 1976 ), noted in Section 1, that all conjunctive [178] [179] ements were interpreted in this way. Justification of the anaphoric character of discourse adverbials is given in (Forbes Forbes 2003 2003) and (Forbes-Riley ...
The goal of understanding how discourse is more than a sequence of
sentences has engaged researchers for many years. Researchers in the
1970's attempted to gain such understanding by identifying and
classifying the phenomena involved in discourse. This was followed by
attempts in the 1980s and early 1990s to explain discourse phenomena
in terms of theories of abstract structure. Recent efforts to develop
large-scale annotated discourse corpora, along with more lexically
grounded theories of discourse are now beginning to reveal interesting
patterns and show where and how early theories might be revised to
better account for discourse data.
D-LTAG is a discourse-level extension of lexicalized tree-adjoining grammar (LTAG), in which discourse syntax is projected by different types of discourse connectives and discourse interpretation is a product of compositional rules, anaphora resolution, and inference. In this paper, we present a D-LTAG extension of ongoing work on an LTAG syntax-semantic interface. First, we show how predicate-argument semantics are computed for standard, ‘structural’ discourse connectives. These are connectives that retrieve their semantic arguments from their D-LTAG syntactic tree. Then we focus on discourse connectives that occur syntactically as (usually) fronted adverbials. These connectives do not retrieve both their semantic arguments from a single D-LTAG syntactic tree. Rather, their predicate-argument structure and interpretation distinguish them from structural connectives as well as from other adverbials that do not function as discourse connectives. The unique contribution of this paper lies in showing how compositional rules and anaphora resolution interact within the D-LTAG syntax-semantic interface to yield their semantic interpretations, with multi-component syntactic trees sometimes being required.
