Abstract
During the course of a coherent conversation or discourse, the participants their attention on some subset of their knowledge. As the discourse goes on, this focused subset may change — it may grow to include more knowledge, narrow down to include just a subset of what it originally contained, or shift (either temporarily or permanently) to a new area of the participants’ knowledge base. In this work we investigate the nature of this focusing during a discourse and its effect on a natural language generation system. Our research examines how the focused knowledge is tracked during human discourse and how changes in the focused set are marked by the human conversational partners. We hypothesize that there are several different kinds of focusing going on in discourse, and attempt to provide a unified account which can handle each. This resulting knowledge will be crucial for a generation system in deciding what to say next and in deciding how to appropriately mark unexpected changes in focus.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Bibliography
James F. Allen and C. Raymond Perrault. Analyzing intention in utterances. Artificial Intelligence, 15: 143–178, 1980.
Doug E. Appelt. Planning Natural-Language Utterances to Satisfy Multiple Goals. PhD thesis, Stanford University, December 1981. Also appears as: SRI International Technical Note 259, March 1982.
Sandra M. Carberry. Tracking user goals in an information-seeking environment. In Proceedings of The National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 59–63, AAAI-83, Wathington, D.C., August 1983.
Cohen, 1983) Robin Cohen. A Computational Model for the Analysis of Arguments. PhD thesis, University of Toronto, Dept of Computer Science, 1983. Also appears as: University of Toronto Computer Systems Research Group Technical Report No. 151.
Robin Cohen. Analyzing the structure of argumentative discourse. Computational Linguistics Journal, 13 (1–2): 11–24, 1987.
C. J. Fillmore. The case for case reopened. In P. Cole and J. M. Sadock, editors, Syntax and Semantics VIII: Grammatical Relations, pages 59–81, Academic Press, New York, 1977.
B. Grosz, A.K. Joshi, and S. Weinstein. Providing a unified account of definite noun phrases in discourse. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual Meeting, pages 44–50, Association for Computational Linguistics, Cambridge, Mass, June 1983.
Barbara Grosz. The Representation and Use of Focus in Dialogue Understanding. Technical Report 151, SRI International, Menlo Park Ca., 1977.
Simon Garrod and Anthony Sanford. Topic dependent effects in language processing. In G.B. Flores d’Arcais and R.J. Jarvella, editors, The Process of Language Understanding, pages 271–296, John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 1983.
Barbara Grosz and Candace Sidner. Discourse structure and the proper treatment of interruptions. In Proceedings of the 1985 Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI85, Los Angeles, Ca., August 1985.
Jerry Hobbs. Coherence and coreference. Cognitive Science, 3: 67–90, 1979.
Eduard H. Hovy. Planning coherent multisentential text. In Proc. 26th Annual Meeting of the ACL, pages 163–169, Assoc. Comp. Ling., Buffalo, New York, June 1988.
Eduard H. Hovy. Two types of planning in language generation. In Proc. 26th Annual Meeting of the ACL, pages 179–186, Assoc. Comp. Ling., Buffalo, New York, June 1988.
Ray Jackendoff. Current Studies in Linguistics Series: Se- mantics and Cognition. MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma., 1983.
Charlotte Linde. Focus of attention and the choice of pronouns in discourse. In T/. Givon, editor, Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 12, pages 337–354, Academic Press, New York, 1979.
Kathleen F. McCoy. Correcting Object-Related Misconceptions. PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, December 1985.
Kathleen F. McCoy. Contextual effects on responses to misconceptions. In G. Kempen, editor, Natural Language Generation: New Results in Artificial Intelligence, Psychology, and Linguistics, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers (Kluwer Academic Publishers), Dordrecht/Boston, 1987.
Kathleen R. McKeown. Generating Natural Language Text in Response to Questions About Database Structure. PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, May 1982.
Kathleen R. McKeown. Focus constraints on language generation. In Proceedings of the 1983 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 582–587, IJCAI, Karlsruhe, Germany, August 1983.
Kathleen R. McKeown. Text generation: Using discourse strategies and focus constraints to generate natural language text. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 1985.
Kathleen R. McKeown. Discourse strategies for generating natural-language text. Artificial Intelligence, 27 (1): 1–41, 1985.
Johanna D. Moore and William R. Swartout. A Reactive Approach to Explanation: Taking the User’s Feedback into Account. In Natural Language Generation in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics, (this volume). Paris, Swartout, Mann (Eds). Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, MA, 1990.
William C. Mann and Sandra A. Thompson. Rhetorical structure theory: description and construction of text structures. In G. Kempen, editor, Natural Language Generation: New Results in Artificial Intelligence, Psychology, and Linguistics, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers ( Kluwer Academic Publishers ), Dor-drecht/Boston, 1987.
CĂ©cile L. Paris and Kathleen R. McKeown. Discourse strategies for descriptions of complex physical objects. In G. Kempen, editor, Natural Language Generation: New Results in Artificial Intelligence, Psychology, and Linguistics, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers ( Kluwer Academic Publishers ), Dordrecht/Boston, 1987.
Rachel Reichman. Conversational coherency. Cognitive Science, 2: 283–327, December 1978.
Reichman, 1981) Rachel Reichman. Plain Speaking: A Theory and Grammar of Spontaneous Discourse. PhD thesis, Harvard University, June 1981. BBN Report No. 4681.
Rachel Reichman-Adar. Extended person-machine interface. Artificial Intelligence, 22 (2): 157–218, 1984.
R. C. Schank and R. Abelson. Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Enquiry into Human Knowledge Structures. Laurence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, 1977.
L. K. Schubert, R. G. Goebel, and N. J. Cercone. The structure and organization of a semantic network for comprehension and inference. In N. V. Findler, editor, Associative Networks: Representation and Use of Knowledge by Computer, Academic Press, N. Y., 1979.
Candace L. Sidner. Towards a Computational Theory of Definite Anaphora Comprehension in English Discourse. PhD thesis, MIT, June 1979.
J.L. Weiner. Blah, a system which explains its reasoning. Artificial Intelligence, 15: 19–48, 1980.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McCoy, K.F., Cheng, J. (1991). Focus of attention: Constraining what can be said next. In: Paris, C.L., Swartout, W.R., Mann, W.C. (eds) Natural Language Generation in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics. The Kluwer International Series in Engineering and Computer Science, vol 119. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-5945-7_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-5945-7_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4419-5125-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-4757-5945-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive