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Coherence Understanding Through Cohesion Markers: The Case of Child Spoken Language

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Speech and Computer (SPECOM 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11096))

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Abstract

Coherence and cohesion are crucial for organizing text semantics and syntax. They both may be described in terms of topic-focus structure, but the surface syntactic topic-focus structure does not coincide with that of deep semantics, and the automatic analysis of coherence which refers to the meaning of the whole text is complicated. The paper presents a Topic-Focus Annotating Parser (TFAP) that was trained on the corpus of Russian unprepared child oral narratives (213 narratives elicited by native Russian children aged from two years seven months to seven years six months). According to the results, children develop their narrative skills both in coherence and cohesion, but at the earlier stages of language acquisition, parsing errors reflect the speaker’s low level of narrative skills, while at the later stages (from five years seven months to seven years six months), when the basic rules of narrative organization are already acquired, parsing errors may be caused by the deficiencies of the parser. The topic-focus schemes we obtained support Leonid Sakharny’s theoretical approach to cognitive representation of coherence.

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Acknowledgements

The work is supported by the research grant number 16-04-50114 (dir. P. Eismont) from the Russian Foundation for Humanities and the research grant number MК-6776.2018.6 (dir. E. Riekhakaynen) from the President of the Russian Federation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Saint Petersburg State University of Aerospace Instrumentation, Bolshaya Morskaya Street 67, 190000, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Polina Eismont

  2. Saint-Petersburg State University, Universitetskaya Emb. 7/9, 199034, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Vladislav Metelyagin & Elena Riekhakaynen

Authors
  1. Polina Eismont
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  2. Vladislav Metelyagin
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  3. Elena Riekhakaynen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Polina Eismont .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. SPIIRAS, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Alexey Karpov

  2. Leipzig University of Telecommunications, Leipzig, Germany

    Oliver Jokisch

  3. Moscow State Linguistic University, Moscow, Russia

    Rodmonga Potapova

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Eismont, P., Metelyagin, V., Riekhakaynen, E. (2018). Coherence Understanding Through Cohesion Markers: The Case of Child Spoken Language. In: Karpov, A., Jokisch, O., Potapova, R. (eds) Speech and Computer. SPECOM 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11096. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99579-3_16

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99579-3_16

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-99578-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-99579-3

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