TOWARDS A DISCOURSE LEVEL COHERENCE STRUCTURE

Parma Nand, Wai Yeap

2010

Abstract

In this paper we argue that coherence relations between discourse units are ultimately based on mentioned discourse entities embedded in the units participating in the relation. Coherence relations as discussed in most literature ((Mann and Thompson, 1988), (Hobbs, 1985), (Grosz and Sidner, 1986) inter alia) are defined between text segments, where a text segment could range from a single utterance to the whole discourse. We show that these coherence relations are formed either directly or indirectly between embedded discourse entities. Other semantic entities might be derived via inference/s based on the mentioned entities and the complexity of these inferences determines some of the types of relations defined in literature. Hence, the coherence relations as defined by (Mann and Thompson, 1988), (Hobbs, 1985) inter alia, existing between text units is essentially an abstraction of these fundamental relations formed between embedded entities. We argue that any representation of discourse coherence structure should entail representation of information down to the resolution level of these embedded entities in order for such structures to be useful for automated language processing tasks. We also show that the commonly accepted tree structure ((Hobbs, 1985),(Marcu, 1996) inter alia) is not sufficient to represent discourse relations to such a resolution level, and propose a semiconstrained directed graph as the alternative.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Nand P. and Yeap W. (2010). TOWARDS A DISCOURSE LEVEL COHERENCE STRUCTURE . In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART, ISBN 978-989-674-021-4, pages 11-19. DOI: 10.5220/0002701500110019

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart10,
author={Parma Nand and Wai Yeap},
title={TOWARDS A DISCOURSE LEVEL COHERENCE STRUCTURE},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART,},
year={2010},
pages={11-19},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0002701500110019},
isbn={978-989-674-021-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 1: ICAART,
TI - TOWARDS A DISCOURSE LEVEL COHERENCE STRUCTURE
SN - 978-989-674-021-4
AU - Nand P.
AU - Yeap W.
PY - 2010
SP - 11
EP - 19
DO - 10.5220/0002701500110019